


The Ideal Man

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [14]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Emotionally Repressed, Grief/Mourning, Intersex Character, Lambert Gets Pegged, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Lambert, Other, Pegging, Post-Canon, The Witcher 3 Spoilers, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher), inexpert dirty talk, sexual crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 06:07:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26847148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: There was nothing left at Kaer Morhen to come back to in the winter of 1273, but Lambert eventually discovered, to his astonishment, that he still was a person despite everything, and of all things, he still needed to go somewhere.(Direct sequel toAretuza Craftsmanship.)
Relationships: Lambert/Keira Metz
Series: Meet Death Sitting [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 259
Kudos: 240





	1. Uncertain Welcome

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers, maybe, in general, for one of the possible endings of W3; I would warn for possible Netflix spoilers but I have no idea where they're planning on going with that series so if this is spoilers it's totally unintentional. Read the end notes for specific warnings about Witcher 3 spoilers; some of them are quite sad. 
> 
> Warnings: Lambert is pretty fucked-up by accumulated stress and grief and so isn't firing on all cylinders; there's a bit of gender shit, all around, and a lack of language to discuss it, carried over from the previous story (Aretuza Craftsmanship); Keira gently misgenders Lambert a couple of times including in the titular line and he is too fucked-up to pick up that she's trying to draw him out about it, but they sort things out.

Lambert stood uneasily at the door of the tidy little farmhouse. He’d made the decision to come here, because he was tired and sore and fucked-up over everything and he didn’t have anywhere else to go and he just wanted to rest, and the invitation was open, and his stuff was here, and he didn’t… have anywhere else to go, or anyone else really. 

Kaer Morhen without Vesemir was an empty husk; Geralt was off with Ciri, and Eskel had agreed they’d never return to the fortress. They’d all hauled out anything they wanted to save, and burned the rest. The ruin was empty. There was nowhere else for him to go. But now that he was here it felt. Weird. 

He hesitated a moment longer, raised his hand to knock, then lowered it again. No, Keira had said she wanted him to come back here, it was fine.

They’d spent a couple of weeks together, all told, had sex once drunk and a couple times sober, which he wasn’t about to admit put her in first place for longevity among his relationships with women. After the big fight with the Wild Hunt at Kaer Morhen, she hadn’t known where to go, and so he’d shown her this place-- not too far, down in Kaedwen, it was a ruined farmhouse with a wraith problem that he’d sure found the edges of, but had never solved. He’d used the spot as a great cache point for a solid decade now, had kept the house from falling completely into disrepair and had kept the nearby village safe from everything else, and in turn they’d never really bothered him about somehow never fixing the wraith issue out here. A couple of years back their herbalist had died, and he’d sold them a lot of stuff over the years to tide them over in the meantime, but this seemed a perfect solution. Nobody here would ask too many questions about a perhaps slightly-overly-powerful herbalist and cunning woman, nobody really cared why it had taken Lambert fifteen-twenty years to finally get rid of the wraiths, nobody was left who’d been trying to inherit this old farmhouse, and now here was a great place Keira could set up shop and be out of reach of anybody with political aspirations until shit settled down in the wider world. The alderman was glad to give him a gift of the place instead of paying him for the wraiths, which had been underpriced on the reward anyway.

Keira had of course promised to keep Lambert’s stuff safe, in return-- and not just the stuff he’d already had cached here. She’d come back and kept him from burning all the shit that was left in Kaer Morhen that he couldn’t carry far enough to cache but couldn’t bear to leave to, like, future archaeologists or whoever came to desecrate the corpse, and portaled it out of the ruins to store it here instead, and obviously she wanted him to come here because she’d said so, and if she didn’t, well-- why did he care? If she’d changed her mind then she could tell him to his face, fuck that. He raised his hand again and brought it forward to knock on the door, and the door swung open.

He stood there a moment, staring at it. Fucking mages. But she was in the room just inside, standing up from a chair, her tits halfway out as usual and her hair weirdly flawlessly-styled and her face porcelain-doll made-up even though she’d been, apparently, at home, alone, by all appearances hard at work on some writings spread out across the kitchen table. “Lambert,” she said cheerfully, “there you are. I had the door spelled to let you in, I hope that wasn’t weird.”

“I was going to knock,” he said, and that sounded stupid. “Uh--”

“Your horse can go right in the stables,” she said. “Do you need help getting your things?”

“I can manage,” he said. 

“Let me help,” she said, and followed him out the door without putting any shoes on, or a coat, or anything. It was spitting a mixture of rain and ice, fitfully, and she was just all pale exposed skin like it was summertime, but he noticed as she stepped in a puddle that her foot didn’t get wet.

“Are you wearing _invisible shoes_?” he demanded.

She laughed. “Don’t sound so mad about it,” she said. “For the record, they’re not invisible shoes, exactly.”

“I don’t care what they are,” he said, disgusted, though not on any deep level. What a profligate waste of magic. But, probably it didn’t take that much to maintain. Still, what if the spell gave out in the middle of a hard fight? Now that he thought of it, she’d worn shoes in battle, hadn’t she?

He couldn’t remember. He knew she _owned_ shoes. Didn’t she? No, she’d definitely had some on during the whole thing with the wraiths. Cute boots, red leather. She owned shoes. 

She took his saddlebags, which were far heavier than she should have been able to carry so easily, but of course, as his medallion reminded him, magic. He decided he was tired enough that he didn’t care. He saw to his horse himself, and was glad to see that it was a normal stable, with real actual hay and genuine oats and nothing magical about the water either. Just a regular old stable, with another regular old horse in it, and signs that someone who knew what they were doing came by to see to the place occasionally at least. 

So, the townsfolk were working out well, too. He’d hoped so. It would’ve been shitty if they’d turned out to be assholes after all, after he’d spent so long cultivating them.

A stall at the far end turned out to contain not a horse, but a goat. He stared into it in blank surprise for a moment, and the goat turned its head up to him and bleated at him. 

It was Eskel’s damn goat. He’d forgotten they’d brought her here. There was a trunk of Eskel’s in the room with Lambert’s stuff, too. The goat had a name. Li’l… something. Probably not Li’l Shitter. Li’l… something-er. Fuck. Well, it didn’t matter, goats didn’t care what you called them. 

He fed her a turnip, and tried not to think about Eskel, who was out there somewhere as lonely as he was. Where _would_ Eskel go for the winter? Fuck. He went back to his horse. 

Keira came back out to get the rest of his luggage as he was finished grooming the horse, and he took his personal luggage but let her take the provisions and things. Everything was a bit light, but he did have some choice specimens.

“I got you something,” he said as they went in the front door, and she gave him a keen look and he had a moment of insecurity. Fuck, that had been boyfriendy of him, which wasn’t what he’d meant. He wasn’t, like, _courting_ her, like they were humans or something. “It’s-- uh, it’s not anything amazing, but I figured you could use it.” He dug through one of his saddlebags until he found the parcel in question, a well-wrapped jar. He pulled off the spare bandage rags he’d had it packed in and handed it over.

She realized immediately what it was. “A cockatrice eye! Oh, those are _fantastically_ useful, thank you ever so much for thinking of me. It did strike me that I ought to have commissioned you to pick some things up for me, but to be honest I thought you’d stop by again sooner.”

Lambert shrugged awkwardly. He’d sold the other eye for a pretty sum, but the buyer hadn’t been able to afford both, and he’d hit on his plan of saving it for Keira then rather than insulting himself by offering a discount. It made a handy gift now but he was worried it would come across as too clingy of him. However, _this_ was a straightforward offer of work, and he wouldn’t reject that out of hand at all. “I mean,” he said. “I usually spend the whole season out. This is a little earlier than I usually come back.” He weighed it, mentally. He was tired, but he always needed more work. He didn’t want to freeload off her generosity more than he could help; dependency was a terrible precedent. “If there’s something you really need, I can make another trip out before winter really sets in.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I really need,” she said. “This, though-- I’ll be right back, I’m going to pop this right into my workshop, I’ve just the thing for it.”

When she came back, her hands were empty, but she was smiling. “Let me get you something to drink-- and you’re probably hungry, aren’t you?”

“I’m always hungry,” Lambert said, “it really doesn’t matter.” He’d eaten on the way, cold trail rations-- he wasn’t going to show up hungry when he wasn’t sure of his welcome. He could always eat more, he’d been hungry so long he didn’t feel it anymore and he was on the last hole on all his fucking belts, which was a pain in the ass, but-- hard times all around, really.

“Ha,” she said, “well, I’ll get something started, anyway-- _I_ should eat, too.” She went over to the door down into the root cellar and poked around, then pulled up a nice iron pot and hung it on the warming arm, then swung that over the fire. His medallion gave a little buzz; she’d magicked food into there, or it had been under a preservation spell or something. 

He realized he had no idea if she knew how to cook. The whole time they’d been together before, he’d just done it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just pick up, you had to be taught. Mage school probably didn’t cover it. He’d learned, had been taught, by his mother and by the instructors at Kaer Morhen-- both how to cook in a kitchen, and how to cook on a campfire. 

But if she could just do it with magic-- well, that was unnerving, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. 

She handed him a cup with what smelled like quite strong beer in it, which was welcome too. “You’ll probably be wanting a bath,” she said, “at least to warm up, but take off your wet jacket and dry out by the fire for a bit first.”

He didn’t mind if he did. He sat and unfastened his boots and gradually pulled off his outer clothes and much of his armor, and she sat across from him and made idle conversation. She told him a story about a stupid client she’d had, and he told a story about a contract, and it felt pleasant and he wasn’t sure what to do with the feeling. This almost counted as small talk, which was something he could do but he couldn’t keep it up infinitely. 

When he’d drunk most of the beer and was down to almost as little clothing as she was wearing-- no armor, no shoes or socks, shirt sleeves, just trousers-- she said, a bit coyly, “I went shopping.”

“Did you,” he said warily, picking up that this was something that involved him, but not much beyond that.

“Well,” she said. “Your request, from earlier. It turned out I didn’t actually have the necessary components. So I picked up… something I think will be suitable, and a couple of options.”

“My request,” he said blankly. 

“And I was talking to Yennefer about something else, but she happened to offer me a spell she has, for just such a use,” Keira went on. “She and I are-- we’re not close usually, but there are… some things we talk about.”

“A spell,” he said blankly. “What--”

“You know,” she said. “For use with the.” She hesitated. “Specialty item.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“That’s obvious,” she said, with a laugh, but he had a sudden creeping suspicion that she was _nervous_. “Perhaps you were too drunk to remember the conversation.”

Too drunk to-- he’d only been drunk with her the one time, the rest of the time they’d been busy with practical shit. What had he requested when he’d-- 

“ _Oh_ ,” he said, suddenly remembering. He hadn’t been able to let it _go_ , and he knew he’d been an idiot about it, but he didn’t exactly remember what the end of the conversation had been, but-- ever since Geralt had made all his insinuations about just what Yennefer had been doing to leave him limping around like that, Lambert had been thinking about-- ah, fuck, he didn’t usually let his mouth run _quite_ like that. 

Keira’s expression shifted to a knowing sort of delight, watching him-- ah fuck, he was blushing, he could feel his face getting hot. “Right,” he said. 

“I’m just saying,” she said, “if you’re not too tired, we could give it a try this evening. Or not! I had fun shopping and even if you don’t want to use it, I have plenty of use for it myself.”

“Oh,” he said hastily, and then didn’t know how to follow it up. “I’m-- interested. I’m-- I’m pretty tired but I’m not-- too tired.” His face was burning like he’d taken a Thunderbolt, _fuck_ , this was embarrassing. But he wasn’t the kind of idiot to feign disinterest in something he-- well, shit, something he really wanted. 

He hadn’t been sure if she’d want to fuck him again. He didn’t get a lot of. Well, he didn’t _make_ a lot of offers, was what it was. Eskel didn’t count, and apart from him, well. There hadn’t been anybody since-- 

\-- since--

He couldn’t really think about that, though, not and keep functioning. The thing was, he wasn’t good at sex without feelings. He tended to grow them, if people were too nice to him, and-- well, this had a lot of danger signs. The last thing he needed was to grow feelings for a fucking _heart-eating sorceress_. Mages were bad news, he knew that down to his bones.

But. He really didn’t want to go out and be cold and alone either and he’d been so fucking lonely and everything fucking _hurt_ , inside, and he didn’t know what else he was going to do. And she’d been-- really fucking nice, was the thing, and it was perfectly straightforward, they’d helped each other out, and enjoying one another’s company was just a nice bonus, and he was too tired to resist that.

She grinned, sort of coy and sort of pleased and a little shy, actually, and sat back in her chair. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not-- too tired.”

“I’m just warning you,” he said, “if you think I’m going to be smooth, I’m not ever smooth, I’m awkward as fuck. If you get me drunk I can pretend to be smooth but I didn’t bring enough booze with me for that.”

“I don’t need you drunk,” she said. “I don’t need you smooth. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m, well. Sort of awkward, myself.”

“Well,” he said. “Good. Then we can be awkward together.”

* * *

Dinner was surprisingly good, and it turned out she didn’t know how to cook, she just bought things premade and put preserving charms on them and left them ready to go so she wouldn’t have to interrupt work she was interested in. She cleared off the writings from the table and packed them away before he could get a good look, which it struck him to be suspicious about but he just didn’t have the energy for that at this point.

Their dinner conversation was surprisingly engaging. She had interesting insights into the current political scene, including some good intel about how Ciri was faring with Emhyr and what the rest of the Lodge of Sorceresses, which she was avoiding any hint of rejoining, was up to without her, and listened in turn to what he’d seen with keen interest that didn’t make it feel like she was prying, somehow. 

He was prepared to just settle in and shoot the shit for a while longer, but she stood up and cleared the dishes with a gesture (were they vanished? Had she put them in the sink? Were they magically clean and back in the cupboards now? How did that work? Maybe she’d tell him, maybe she wouldn’t. He didn’t ask) and said, “I have a-- if you don’t mind a magical, er, trip through a portal, I take my baths in there and it’s always set up. Would that be too weird? I could probably find a tub if I tried hard enough.”

“A magical,” Lambert said, and let that trail off. He hated portals, but there were worse things in the world, and he was interested enough in this to give it a shot. “Well, fuck, sure. Why the hell not.”

“I think I have a robe that’ll fit you,” she said, “and I keep a lot of towels in there already. Hold on, and I’ll show you the way in there.”

* * *

“I have no idea what this is,” Lambert said, blinking at what sure enough was a portal that had popped open when she’d moved a weird-looking skull on a shelf.

“I built this whole thing when I was stuck hiding as a hedgewitch in Velen,” she said, and she had her arms full of soft fabric, a sumptuous green and black brocade. She took his hand, which he hadn’t expected, and her fingers were cool and smooth against his. “Come on, it’s safe. I put a lot of effort into it, and so even though now I’ve got this place which is plenty big enough that I could put in a more normal bathhouse, I still--”

It was warm on the other side of the portal, through the odd wooden doorway, and it was like being outdoors, in a forest, at night, but there were a paucity of the usual forest scents. And there was no sky, it had a cave ceiling. It didn’t smell much like a cave. A little cool rock and fungus, but mostly it smelled of forest-- loam, earth, trees, sap, water. Rabbits-- a rabbit hopped by. There were flowers, night-blooming ones, heavily fragrant, and he followed her down a charming well-beaten path to some ruined steps, and up, and there was a tiled tub, lit with torches, set against a picturesquely ruined bit of wall, and it was full of fresh hot water, propelled through some little jets somehow, like a hot spring but without much of the harsh mineral scent springs usually carried. 

“Anyway,” she said, “I liked it, so-- It doesn’t take any effort to maintain now, really-- I already spent the energy on it. So I might as well. You can use it anytime you like, it doesn’t take magic to access it, just the portal setup and that’s tied to that skull now, so it’s easy enough to access.”

“What the fuck,” Lambert said, mentally still stuck several minutes earlier, back at the portal. The tub was tiled in tiny mosaic tiles, glittering in the torchlight.

“It’s nice,” she said, a little defensive. She hung her armload of fabric on an ornate metal hook in the wall next to another hanging bundle of fabric-- printed silk, the other fabric looked like. There was a shelf nearby, full of towels and washcloths and things, all neatly folded. “Look, use as many towels as you want, they’re real-- just bring them back through the portal when you’re done so I can send them to the laundry, there’s not a laundry in here. There’s a shelf over there with soap-- the soap is real too, none of it is magic because then the effects would dissipate and I don’t want that. The water’s real too, you really do stay clean after you bathe in here. It’s not an illusion.”

“How does this work?” Lambert asked, incredulous. “How big is it? Could I just go running off that path and-- go other places?”

“No,” she said, “it’s all self-contained, it’s a cave and it dead-ends. I didn’t actually make it very big. I thought about putting more into it, but-- this is all I could really come up with, at the time, and it did kind of take a lot of effort.”

“But it’s not an illusion,” Lambert said, squinting suspiciously around.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a real place, it’s just-- elsewhere.”

“Wow,” he said, frowning intently. He’d-- he had a thing, a magical doohickey, he’d picked up this last time out, and it showed him illusions and let him see through them and dispel them, but as he patted his pockets he realized he’d shed his gambeson so he didn’t have it on him. That was odd, that he hadn’t thought twice about -- Well, that was fine, he’d have to take another look at the place some other time. “So I just--”

“You can just take a bath,” she said. “Do you want privacy or company?”

Lambert considered that. “Well,” he said. “I mean-- company’s nice but I should warn you, I’m pretty thoroughly trained not to have sex in the bath, they beat that into us at Kaer Morhen.”

“It was a concern?” she said, amused. 

“Bunch of hormone-addled teenagers and some hot springs? Hell yes it was a concern,” he said. 

“Kaer Morhen had hot springs?” she said, seizing onto the important part of that.

“ _Had_ ,” he said. “They wrecked it when they sacked the place.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well… for what it’s worth I’ve never had sex in this bathtub anyway.” She smiled, and tossed her hair a little, a mannered affectation that Lambert struggled not to find annoying. Sometimes what had to be the real her peeked through, and sometimes she reverted to this sort of bullshit, and he wasn’t sure who had taught her she had to do that sort of thing. “Who’s to say a man and a woman cannot share a bath without untoward shenanigans?”

“Not a man,” Lambert said, on pure reflex, and he was suddenly even more tired than he had been.

“A Witcher, then,” she said, which... wasn’t wrong. She sighed. “For what it’s worth I suppose by that logic I’m not a woman either.” And she gave him a funny little sidelong glance.

He thought about getting more into it-- he _wasn’t_ a man, and she ought to know that if she was fucking him-- and then thought how tired he was, and let it drop. Just like he had every other time it had come up so far. He was a fucking chickenshit coward who was going to keep getting what he deserved as long as he failed to fix the problem. “Well, I’m getting in, and getting some soap on here, because I’ve downright got a _patina_ and I’m not pleased about it.”

She giggled, and he shed his trousers and stripped off his shirt before he could think more on that. He didn’t waste any time, but stepped out of his braies and into the water, and sank down onto one of the warm, tiled benches with a sigh.

He cracked an eye to watch her undressing, which she did mostly normally, though there was definitely a hum in his medallion as she undid some magical thing or other. Maybe her invisible shoes, he sure hoped she didn’t bathe in those. Anyway, she was as ever a pleasure to look at, and she slipped gracefully into the water and perched just about arm’s reach away, sighing as she submerged herself to the shoulders. 

He ducked his head underwater and scrubbed at his scalp for a long time, finally coming up when he felt something touch his shoulder. “Mm?”

Keira was staring at him. “You-- how long can you hold your breath?”

He grinned. “Quarter of an hour, at least,” he said. He felt a great deal better already, for having scrubbed out a lot of the accumulated filth. He looked down at the water. “Hope that wasn’t too much dirt.”

“No,” she said, “it flows through, it’s fine.” She laughed. “I’m upstream.”

“Sensible,” he said. “Ah, I’m going to soap up and then submerge for a while. Keep count if you like, I’ll stay under a bit.”

“Don’t,” she said, and laughed in mild distress and amusement. “Oh no!”

He made a show of looking around as he picked up the bar of soap and one of the neatly-folded washcloths she’d brought to the edge of the pool. “I’m not going to drown,” he said, “unless something holds me under the water, and since apparently you created this whole world, you’d know if you created something that’d be holding unwary Witchers underwater?”

“Hmm,” she said, still unconvinced, but she sat back. Her breasts… behaved slightly oddly in the water, and he eyed them critically for a moment; there was maybe an illusion or something on there, or something, that wasn’t letting them move freely. 

Well, it wasn’t his business, exactly. He rubbed soap into his hair and did his ears and the back of his neck and then took the soap, wrapped it in the wet washcloth, and submerged himself, as he’d said he would, and stayed under while he scrubbed the rest of himself, toes and soles and ankles and shins and knees and thighs and groin and ass and belly and inside his belly button and all the way up his ribs and all he could reach of his back, his armpits and his arms and under his fingernails, and his chest and his neck, and then he lay there for a while on the bottom of the pool, opening his eyes as he felt the soap wash away and leave the water clear.

Keira was sitting on her bench fidgeting a little, fingers lacing together and then unlacing. He could admire her from this vantage point, though she disappeared above the surface of the water at right about breast level and then, of course, was hard to see, given how light refracted. So he admired her legs, which unfortunately she was keeping demurely pressed closed, probably because she was nervous and uncomfortable because he was doing weird Witchery shit. 

She was awfully pretty, and he wondered how much of it was real. What he liked about her were the tantalizing glimpses she gave him of the real person, but she was wrapped up in so much bullshit, like she felt she had to put on a show all the time. Of course the very most attractive part was the way she could shoot fucking lightning out of her hands and destroy enemies, but that was also the most frightening part of her and you couldn’t really build a relationship on that sort of aroused terror. Her sarcasm and dry sense of humor and fantastic tits had filled in the rest and at this point he was fairly hooked.

Well, it didn’t matter; he still wasn’t sure what it was she liked about him, and figured it was too much to ask for to try and get her to just be genuine with him. This was pretty explicitly a convenience thing, not like, a marriage of true loves, so. He let the last of his breath out, and came up to the surface, greatly relaxed and much, much cleaner. 

She had her arms crossed across her breasts, and startled a little as he surfaced, though he came up gently, letting his face break the surface and then sitting up. “I feel about a thousand times better,” he said. “How long was that? I was done so I came up before I ran out of air.”

“I wasn’t actually keeping track,” she said, “but it was probably around five minutes.”

“Yeah I can go a lot longer than that,” he said, digging in his ear briefly to get the water to flow out. “Especially if I’m not swimming around or like, fighting. Takes up a lot of air, that kind of thing.”

“I imagine so,” she said. “You really don’t need me to keep time, though.”

“No,” he said. “I have a pretty good handle on it, myself.” He stretched his neck, feeling his shoulders unlock. “Fuck, if this were about nine degrees hotter I would never leave, I would just live right here.”

She laughed. “That would get boring for me, alas.” She sat up a little. “Oh, I should have brought some wine.”

“I’d fall asleep,” Lambert said, and sprawled out, submerging himself to the lower lip, with his head tipped back a bit and his arms hooked on the edge of the tub. “Ah. No, sleeping in the tub’s a terrible idea.”

“Nine degrees warmer,” Keira said thoughtfully. “I’m aware Witchers have a higher average body temperature than humans, but it’s not nine whole degrees hotter.”

“No,” Lambert said, “but we also don’t feel pain the same way, so it’s not like it’s gonna hurt.” He sat up slightly, looking around the weird cave-forest with a sudden burst of interest. “You don’t have a cold pool too, do you?”

“I don’t,” she said, after a thoughtful pause. She slid him a look. “Why?”

“The absolute fucking best thing,” he said, “is to sit in a hot pool until you can’t stand it, and then run and jump into a cold pool until you can’t stand it, and then run back into the hot pool until you can’t stand it. Really makes you appreciate being alive.”

“Is this like how the Kaedweni hit each other with birch branches sometimes?” she asked suspiciously.

“Oh,” Lambert said, “maybe, but I never went in for that. Just the cold and hot pools.”

She sighed, sinking down lower into the tub so the water washed up onto her shoulders. It did not wet the ends of her hair where it touched them, which solidified his suspicion that maybe her hair was entirely an illusion. He’d have to get that illusion-showing thingy out. 

But then, maybe it would be rude. What did it matter what her hair actually looked like? If she wanted him to see it as flawless and shiny and weirdly swoopy at the ends, then that’s what she wanted, and why did he care if it was something else? This was at least a harmless illusion. Obviously it wasn’t like it was taking her effort she couldn’t easily spare to maintain it, if she was also wearing invisible shoes for no fucking reason most of the time. 

He was going to buy her a pair of house slippers next time he was out and about. The fuzzy kind, sheepskin, that laced up the ankle. Unglamorous, practical, well-made, and comfy. That was what he was going to do, and he was going to see if she would actually wear them or if she was too busy having invisible shoes.

“I guess I could make you a cold pool,” she said, just as Lambert was mentally frozen evaluating the fact that he had just started _making future plans_ to annoy her. “There could be room in here for that sort of nonsense.”

“I mean,” he said, and then didn’t know how to go on. “You don’t have to.”

“Well of course I don’t have to,” she said, “but I _could_ , is the thing, and then I could find out whether what you’re describing is the sort of thing any kind of sane person would like, or if it’s just a mad Witcher thing.”

“Non-Witchers like that kind of shit,” Lambert said reasonably. “I have plenty of mad Witcher things, but that’s not one of them.” He gave up on freaking out about it, and said, “Do you own regular real visible shoes?”

“I do,” she said. “I’ll wear some later if you want.”

He laughed. “It’s not a question of want.”

“Do the illusions and glamors and things bother you?” she asked. “I’m never quite sure what that medallion of yours can sense, I don’t mean to alarm you.”

“You don’t have to--” he began, and then reminded himself they didn’t know one another all that well. “I mean. You should do what you want but like. I don’t-- I’m not going to be in any position to judge, like, what your hair looks like.”

She touched the ends of her hair, which should be wet but weren’t, and her expression was hard to read, eyebrows drawn in almost in a frown but mouth ambiguously taut. “Ah,” she said. “Well.”

“I don’t _mind_ ,” he said. “And it’s not that I don’t appreciate that, uh. That you look nice, and, and that sort of thing. I do. It’s just. I don’t. If it’s an effort, you shouldn’t--” 

She put her hand on his arm, stopping his speech. “If it helps you to know, I wear a fair number of illusions and glamors when I’m completely alone, as well.”

He regarded her for a moment, looking at her slender arm, the curve of her throat, the odd set of her face-- she thought he was going to make fun of her, perhaps, and he _was_ , surely, that was how he was, but not-- like this. “Actually it does,” he said, as certainty crystallized in him; he hadn’t been sure how he felt about it but now he was. “If that’s how you _want_ to look, you should look like that.” 

“Some of it’s just keeping things under control and out of my way,” she said, letting go of his arm, but that slope to her shoulders was relief. Lambert had, for once in his entire life, said the right thing, and it felt weird and warm in his chest. 

“Most of us don’t get that kind of chance to control things,” he said, and thought for a moment about what illusions he’d use if he had the ability. Mostly he was fine, he looked how he looked and it was all for decent practical reasons that felt good because they gave him control, but sometimes, well. His dad’s fucking hairline, for example, would be nice to take a break from. He couldn’t grow his hair out without looking like an idiot. 

But, it was what it was. 

“My hair’s frizzy if I don’t style it,” she said, like she was telling him a secret, “and it’s easiest to maintain if I do it magically.”

That made him laugh, hard enough that he rocked back. She looked alarmed briefly, and then her face set, and he stopped laughing because now she thought he was making fun of her again. “No,” he said, “no-- _my_ hair is frizzy as shit and I gotta comb all kinds of fuckin’ _shit_ through it to keep it under control, that’s all, I’m not laughing at you I’m laughing at me. Mutated to shit and the only thing I can do for my hair is, fuckin’, _bear grease_ or whatever I can find, and you’re over here with magic.”

Her expression warmed, and turned-- fond, maybe? That was a lot to hope for, he’d settle for _amused_ \-- and she slid over next to him and knocked her shoulder against his, smiling. “Maybe I’ll make you some magical bear grease, then,” she said. “We can swap hair care tips.”

“Only if you want to look like hell,” he said. “My specialty-- my whole aesthetic, really-- is looking like hell at all times.”

She pressed her shoulder into his again, gentler. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “But. I could stand to look scarier, sometimes. I feel like maybe I’m a one-trick pony and my trick is getting old.”

He laughed, softer. “You want a makeover?” he said. 

“I should change up my look,” she said. “I’ve actually been doing the Polite Fiction Of A Peasant schtick for rather a long time. But I don’t know where to go from here, really.”

“Brr,” he said, having a sudden vision of the other sorceress he’d spent a lot of time with, far less willingly, “don’t go all Yennefer of Vengerburg on me, the world doesn’t need two of her.”

Keira laughed. “Oh, pray tell, wise fashion counselor, what has she done that’s so wrong?”

“You can wear _colors_ ,” Lambert said, ticking off on his fingers, “you don’t have to enter a contest for Most Dramatic Bitch every time you enter or leave a room, you can have a conversation without it having to be a Series of Pronouncements, and did I mention you can wear clothing that contains some kind of colors?”

“I wasn’t going to overhaul my entire personality,” Keira said, and she was amused enough that her face had scrunched up, which was sort of adorable but he didn’t know if he should mention that. “Just my wardrobe.”

“Well,” Lambert said, “wear colors, I guess, and moreover maybe don’t make every single bodice in your wardrobe so heavily boned that your _lungs creak_.”

“I was thinking I’d stick to red and blue,” Keira said, “and I was going to stay blonde.”

“Good,” Lambert said, and then it struck him to wonder if he had a fucking _type_ , but he dismissed that as quickly as it came; this was not the time for that kind of introspection. “I’d wear a lot more colors if they’d actually stay colors but I spend most of my life drenched in filth so there’d be no point.”

“You can wear colors with me,” she said, leaning harder on him for a moment. It occurred to him that maybe she was trying to jostle him but couldn’t actually move him, he was planted too firmly. He pushed back gently with his shoulder, careful not to slosh her. 

“Sure,” he said, and thought slightly wistfully of that one box of clothes, that she’d kept him from burning without ever knowing what it contained. Maybe he could… well, he’d work up to that. 

“But Yennefer’s not all bad,” Keira said. “She was very generous with her time and information, when I met with her.”

“That’s nice,” Lambert said. “She scares the fuck out of me.”

Keira laughed. “I’m not saying she’s not formidable,” she said, “but she’s not so bad as all _that_.”

“Easy for _you_ to say,” Lambert said, looking down at her. “You can shoot lightning out of your hands and, like, _fly_.”

“You can shoot flames out of your fingers,” Keira said, amused. “It’s not like you’re some slouch.”

Lambert made a face, leaned back and held up his hand, casting the tiniest little _Igni_ so it flickered in place, just enough that he could have lit a candle with it. “Mm,” he said, “so impressive. Meanwhile Yennefer unhinges her jaw and swallows me whole.” He let the Igni go out and pulled his hand underwater fast enough to generate a little hiss of steam where the Sign had just been. “I have no real illusions about my place in the food chain, here.”

“I wouldn’t eat you whole unless you asked,” Keira offered lightly. 

He looked narrowly sidelong at her, trying to gauge how she’d meant that. He knew more about sexual fetishes than many people despite being far less interested in sex than most of his cohort, because he’d found it amusing to seek out books about the more disturbing fetishes and leave them in Geralt’s room, so he knew fine well that there were people for whom being actually devoured was a devout sexual fantasy, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you just… _mentioned_ , particularly not if you weren’t sure how the joke was going to go over. People tended to assume you were _into_ whatever it was, if you had to explain it, and then you sounded like you were just in denial when you insisted you weren’t. 

He’d made the mistake once of making a joke about foot fetishes to Aiden, one time, and Aiden had never let him live it down, had forever afterward made jokes, had gone so far as to--

Ah, fuck, he’d done it now, he’d thought of him. He closed his eyes, just as Keira laughed wildly. 

“Oh no!” she said, “you know about vore, don’t you.”

“I wasn’t going to say it,” he said.

“If you’re into that,” she said, mock-earnestly, “I support you, but I’m, uh.”

Lambert stared morosely down through the water at his feet, and hers, and thought of how Aiden would have seized upon Lambert’s distress at Keira’s stupid invisible shoes as irrefutable evidence of the foot fetish he refused to acknowledge, and then he considered maybe going back down to lie on the bottom of the pool for a while. 

He laughed, bitterly. “It was an inside joke,” he said thinly, as awkward silence fell. “Fuck, it was an inside joke, and--” He couldn’t say any more.

“And you’re the only one who knows why it was funny, now,” she said quietly. 

“Fuck,” he said, and closed his eyes. Finally, he laughed again at himself, sharp and bitter, and said, “It fucking-- wasn’t even about vore, I was trying to explain foot fetishes, actually, and he refused to believe that this was something I just _kne_ w about and not something I actually _had_ , and it was a running joke for years that I was really into feet but couldn’t face it, and.” He breathed in, and let it out.

“Close friend?” she said.

“Closest,” he said. 

She put her arms around him, gently but firmly enough he didn’t feel like he had to throw her off and shrink away, and held on, pulling him close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what that’s like.”

“Fuck,” he said, breathing through it; it felt like a big knot in his stomach. It had been well over a year. No, more than two now. Fuck. He was too warm to shiver but he twitched, all over, and then took a breath in and let it out.

“I’ll wear visible shoes,” she said, very solemnly and sympathetically, “so I don’t tempt you with my harlot toes.”

“Fuck you,” he said, laughing, and pushed her away, though not as roughly as he would have another Witcher. She was an all-powerful sorceress with lightning hands and powers of levitation but she just had human bones, after all.

She laughed. “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to lie, I had been hoping you would.”

Lambert was almost dizzy with the sudden changes in intense emotion, and it was almost as good for this sort of thing as being drunk. Feeling something was a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing, even if it was hard to keep up with. 

He pushed off and fetched up with his arms bracketing her against the side of the pool. She was flushed from the heat, eyes sparkling with amusement at his reaction, and she tipped her head back a little, clearly letting him corral her against the side of the pool. Under the water, her thighs slid slick and weightless around his waist, and she leaned into his grasp a bit, lips parting, eyes going half-shut. Human bones or no, she wasn’t afraid of him, not one bit. 

He looked down into her face. “Is that what you want?” he asked. It came out harder-edged than he’d meant; he’d been going for playful but the grief had clawed him open and he was raw and a little wild with it. 

He couldn’t smell her, not over the scent of the water, but he could see how her pupils went a little wider, feel how her heart picked up. Oh, she was into it. He pried his hands off the edge of the pool and slid them under her thighs, grabbed her by the ass and picked her up, standing up in the water.

“Well, I already said, not in the pool,” he said, and carried her out of it, dripping. He pressed her against the wall, dripping, and kissed her. 

She moaned and kicked her feet a little, though he could tell she wasn’t trying to get free. Maybe she was trying to say something but he didn’t give her a chance to, he just kept kissing her, hard and deep and aggressive. Her heart had kicked way up now and her hands were tight on his shoulders, holding on.

Finally she did pull away, though, and blinked up at him, breathing hard. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s where I wanted to go with this. But let me dry off, and come back to the real world with me, hm?”

“If you insist,” he said, and let her down. She handed him a towel from the shelf, and he took it and wrapped it around himself, a bit surprised to realize how large it was. 

She toweled herself off, and her breasts moved much more normally-- she must have shed whatever enchantment or illusion was on them. She noticed him looking and smiled at him, conspiratorially, as if her breasts were some kind of secret she was letting him in on.

She was so weird. He _liked_ her, and he liked her most when she was being weird. He didn’t know how to explain that. In a moment she’d surely pull herself together and do something she felt like she was supposed to, and he’d be vaguely annoyed and wrong-footed and have to kind of muddle through going along with it. There had to be a better way.

He put his hand around the back of her neck and kissed her forehead before he could think better of it. It wasn’t a sexy thing to do, wasn’t romantic, was just fond, and they didn’t _really_ know one another well enough for him to be fond, but-- well, she was cute, she was being cute, he wasn’t going to second-guess the impulse. She giggled, and he let go and went to the hook where she’d hung up the fabric she’d been carrying.

“I think the green one will fit you,” she said, and he hesitated a moment before pulling down what turned out to be quite a sumptuous robe in a green tone-on-tone brocaded fabric shot with black that must have been fantastically expensive. It was lined, inside, with soft, soft fabric, dark green and smooth, maybe silk. He toweled himself off a little better before pulling it on, suddenly concerned he’d get water spots on something too nice to be against his perpetually-filthy skin.

But he was clean, just now, and he toweled his hair dry and then pulled the robe around himself. It was below his calves, below his elbows, and was voluminous enough that it went over his shoulders-- probably, the shoulder seams were meant to be dropped low, but they hit at his actual shoulders, and the belt hit a little above where he wore his trousers, but below his ribs, near his natural waist-- where he tended to wear skirts-- and the skirt of the robe was full, had godets at the hips so it would fall over full skirts if necessary, it had _yards_ of fabric in it, all lined, and it swirled around his legs in a soft heavy sweep of pure bliss.

She pulled on her own robe, a shorter printed-silk one in pale blue and pink that wasn’t nearly so nice-- unlined, she’d freeze-- and made a face. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s one of mine, it’s a bit girly-- but I don’t exactly have a great stock of clothes for men in this house.” She hesitated. “Except, I guess, yours.”

_My clothes aren’t a man’s clothes_ , he thought, but he was too distracted to bother saying it out loud. Instead, “Are you kidding,” he said, “this thing is _fantastic_.” He swiveled his hips a little so the fabric swished heavily around the backs of his knees, against his calves. “Fuck, I would _live_ in this if I could.”

It smelled vaguely of perfume, but not too strongly. She gave him a critical once-over, adjusted the lay of the collar; it was cut like a woman’s garment, overlapped the wrong direction for a man’s, bared an expanse of his collarbones not in keeping with men’s fashion and left his forearms largely bare, but it did fit him well enough for freedom of movement.

“Well,” she said, “it’s too big for me and not my style, so you certainly can keep it.”

He laughed. “It’s not really my style for the Path, exactly, but.”

“Well,” she said, “it can go with all your other things, that stay here,” and she smiled and patted his shoulder. “Let’s go, I want to get on with our evening.”

_All your other things_ , he thought, _that stay here_. All his things that were in this mage’s house, all the time. Like the box of all his other fancy clothes that were totally unsuited for the Path, that he only ever wore in rare truly private moments. That he’d only ever worn with--

Ah, he was back to thinking of him again. It was inevitable. Among the things in that box were the shoes Aiden had bought him, partly to be an ass and partly seriously. They were beautiful shoes, completely unsuited to a Witcher, and Lambert didn’t think he could ever wear them again, had only ever put them on briefly, but owning them was important, and in this moment he was suddenly, excruciatingly glad he hadn’t burned them, that Keira had given him a place to keep these things he couldn’t carry but couldn’t bear to let someone else find. 

He gathered up his dirty clothes, slotted one of his knives in its sheath into the sash belt of the robe so he’d have it with him, and followed her back through the portal, wordless, gnawing at whatever emotion was filling his whole midsection even as he thrilled at the way the robe’s skirt swished around his legs as he walked. It felt so good, it was so soft, it was so heavy, it was so full. 

“The more I look at you, the more I think how well that robe looks on you,” Keira said. “And here I was thinking it wasn’t your style.”

“I got unexpected depths,” Lambert managed to say, though it came out a bit hoarse. “Or like. Breadths. I don’t know how deep any of it is.”

She laughed and knocked her shoulder against his as she led him through the portal and back into her kitchen. “Knowing you it’s unexpectedly deep too,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. 

She laughed, and didn’t answer. Probably, she wasn’t laughing at him, though by rights she probably ought to be. “If you want to check the other bedroom, where all your things are-- I don’t know if there’s anything in there you really want to check in on? I sealed the wards around it when you left and I haven’t been in there but you might want to get some of your spare clothes or something, make sure everything’s all right?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said. She’d made a big deal out of sealing the wards, when he’d been here before. He’d appreciated it, a bit; the important stuff was in locked boxes, but he’d been so fucked-up over everything that had happened, he hadn’t really given it that much thought. After everything, he’d just sort of-- taken her word for it. 

“This way, then,” she said, and led him through the next room, to the one after-- two rooms opened directly off the room off the kitchen, and she stood in front of one of the doors and gestured. The wards fell away, he recognized that was what they were as they dissolved, and he remembered standing here as she’d cast them.

She pushed the door open, and then stood aside. “I’ll just be-- the other room is where I sleep,” she said. “I-- if you want to-- the bed in this room should be made, there’s firewood, if you want to build a fire you can stay in here, I won’t mind. If you’re too tired after all.”

He looked into the room, and used a Sign to light the lamp attached to the wall, and then looked over at her. From just the one glance he’d seen that the boxes and things were stacked just as he’d left them. The room was a little dusty; no one had set foot in it. 

“I don’t really need anything in here right now,” he said. He didn’t want to be alone. Would it be pathetic to admit that? “It’s enough to know it’s there.” And he used a tiny Sign to put the lamp back out, and turned away from the door. “I’ll leave it open, it can get warm in there, air out a bit, but I don’t need to go in there until you kick me out of your room.” 

She hesitated just a fraction, eyes lingering on the dark doorway, but then she smiled at him, looking genuinely delighted. “All right then,” she said, and held out her hand.

He took it, and followed her into her bedroom.


	2. You Can Just Opt Out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The warnings for the whole story apply mostly to this chapter. This is where we get the Explicit rating.

The room was, of course, larger on the inside than the outside, and in a different architectural style; of course she’d borrowed something else and magically constructed herself a magpie-hoard of a bedchamber. It had an enormous grand bedstead with curtains, a dramatically huge fireplace in the wall, a big window seat opposite that with leaded glass that looked out over a dramatic landscape of a bend in a river that was clearly nowhere _near_ here, and assorted other heavy ornate furniture. There was also a birch grove growing in one of the corners, the trunks coming up from the floor and going out seamlessly through the ceilings.

He vaguely remembered about a quarter of this-- some furniture, the vague size of the room that had been here before-- she’d clearly feathered the nest since he’d last been here. “Redecorated a bit, did you,” he said.

There was a plush wool carpet underfoot as they drew nearer the bed; it must have cost a fortune. Or, it was magic. Hard to say. It felt lovely under his feet. “A bit,” she said. “I like to spice things up.”

“I’m not complaining,” he said.

She led him over toward the bed, but he paused to look at the hearth as they went by. It had a good fire in it, throwing off a fair bit of heat, as if someone had just tended it. Was it an illusion? He held his hand out to it. If it was, it was a good illusion.

She gestured at the window, and the curtains slid closed, heavy brocade shielding the moonlit vista from view and shutting off any draft. “Hang on,” she said, “I’m going to set wards.”

“Wards,” he said.

“I have enemies, still,” she said, “and I don’t like the idea of anyone spying on me here, so I set wards most nights when I’m in for the night. They’re over the whole house most of the time but I like another layer for the night.”

“Fair,” he said, and then his medallion pulsed sharply as she made a wider gesture. He stood and watched her; a lot of the time, her movements had a… studied quality to them, like she had practiced how best to stand, to walk, to gesture, so as to look graceful and intentional all the time. But when she did magic, there was none of that; every gesture was direct, to the point, to channel as much chaos as possible as precisely as possible to get done what she intended to do. Gone was any practiced archness in her expression, as well; she made fierce faces, chin jutting with determination, teeth gritted, eyes squinted.

It was really attractive.

It was attractive because it wasn’t sexy.

He went over and dropped heavily into the overstuffed armchair near the bed, sighing in relief at how comfortable it was. The robe tugged a little in the shoulders, sleeves sliding up his arms, but it felt fantastic, and it splayed out around his legs with satisfying drama. The overlap slid open along one thigh, but stayed mostly in place, and it felt like it looked good; he wasn’t looking, as he’d tipped his head back and was staring unseeing at the ceiling.

He was tired, and after the hot soak his muscles mostly just wanted to unspool and lie limply in a puddle. But it was a long time since anyone had touched him, and that little taste of how soft her skin had felt and how eager her mouth had been-- well, his libido was awake now, and he was certainly not too tired to indulge it. Especially with this silk robe sliding all over his skin and swishing around his legs like a dress-- he felt pretty and he felt sexy and he wanted to touch her and be touched in ways that weren’t violent, for once, and to feel something that wasn’t _bad_.

She came and stood in front of him, hands on her hips, body angled just so in a posture that flattered her figure. “Well,” she said.

He settled himself a little lower in the chair, so that his head was angled to see her better without him having to exert any effort with his neck muscles. “Mm,” he said, feeling the robe slide heavily further off his thighs. “You had some plans, it sounded like.”

“If you’re not too tired,” she said, a little uncertainty creeping into her voice and the angle of her arms.

He laughed softly. “I’d have to be pretty fuckin’ beat to shit before I’d want to skip out on doing this with you,” he said.

She pulled on the tie of her robe and it whispered open, and somehow she was wearing fancy lingerie under it, which-- well, it was magic, he knew she’d put that robe on naked and she hadn’t been out of his sight since, but she was a mage, so none of that counted. He wasn’t opposed to fancy lingerie one bit, but he did wonder what she’d think if he wore any. (He did own some. Most of it was in that box. He wore it more than some of the other stuff, since he could put it under practical clothes. It helped a lot, reminding him of what he was besides just a Witcher.)

“Nice,” he said, not really knowing what else to say. She was watching him like she expected him to do something, so he untied the belt of his robe. “Unfortunately I can’t reciprocate since I don’t have magic, so all that’s under here is what was under there when I put this robe on.”

She laughed, a real one, and slid her hand in the front of the robe, peeling it back from his chest. “Fortunately I’m interested in that,” she said, and managed to wriggle a knee in beside him, and got into his lap.

Not perfectly ideal as a lovemaking spot, especially with the acres of soft bedding right there-- he could smell the laundry soap but also the scent of her body in it, and know she really slept there, and had changed the sheets recently but not that recently, and that nobody else slept there. But it was-- closeness, and he hadn’t touched or been touched in so long-- he slid his hands up under the robe, over the expensive lace and silk of her lingerie, cradling the weight of her hips in his hands and pulling her close against himself.

She kissed him and ran her hands over his chest and his shoulders and his neck and his jaw. Would’ve been nice to shave, he thought, but she didn’t seem to care; at least his beard was clean and at this length wouldn’t bother her skin too much.

After a little while he was done with this chair; he could smell how aroused she was, and he was in a similar state himself, and he was ready to move on, so he stood up with her in his arms and peeked over her shoulder without pulling his mouth away from hers, took a few careful steps over, and dumped her onto the bed.

She squeaked and giggled in an appealingly unpracticed manner, and he climbed after her, lowering his head and giving her a good predator stalk-- if she could practice how to move, so could he, and that was the one he’d practiced.

It only made her giggle more, not because (he reminded himself) she had no sense of self-preservation, but because she was, after all, an insanely powerful mage. Sure, he was actually an extremely dangerous predator, but so was she, and in a fight to the death, well, he’d left all of his knives but the one back with his clothes and both his swords, and all her weapons were contained within her, and the lightning she could call made his little Signs look like a joke.

It was ridiculous to do that math now, so instead he jokingly snapped his teeth at her (they genuinely _were_ sharp, after all) and then flopped down to pin her to the bed.

She got his wrists and with a quite competent wrestling move flipped him over. He let her do it, to see what she was after, and she pushed him down flat on his back, flipped the robe open, and straddled his bare hips in a triumphant posture, shedding her robe and tossing her hair back.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve sure got me, now what?”

She bit her lower lip and traced her hand down the middle of his chest, her fingers mapping across his abdominal muscles with intent purpose. He tried not to be ticklish about it. “I didn’t know some of these muscles existed,” she said. “I mean-- they were in my anatomy textbook but you can’t actually see them on most people.”

He squirmed slightly, uncomfortable. “I’m about twenty-five pounds down from where I ought to be, that’s why,” he said. He was all muscle and bone and gristle: a couple of hard years had worn away what scant padding he ever managed to accumulate. “Ugh.” His body was ugly like this, all ridged and sinewy, every twitch visible, every throb of a vein, no secrets and no safety. He’d gotten injured because of it a couple of weeks back, a claw swipe that got through his armor but would’ve safely and harmlessly slid over his fat layer catching in one of his abdominal muscles and causing him real problems instead. It had healed ugly, too, a nasty puckered scar just above his hip on the left, shiny pink with fresh potion-aided healing.

She frowned at his expression. “It looks good,” she said.

He shook his head. “I think it looks _gross_ ,” he said.

She laughed. “You look like the ideal man in all the anatomy books.”

He couldn’t hide his expression at that, and being too tired to say anything wasn’t going to pass any longer. “I’m not one,” he said.

“Right,” she said, indulgent. Maybe a little condescending. “You’re a Witcher. _Male_ , then, I should have said.”

“ _No_ ,” he said, sharper than he should have; it wasn’t her fault he hadn’t explained it. “It’s not-- that’s not-- I’m _not_.” Now he couldn’t look at her, and his face had gone hot.

She didn’t move for a moment, hand still spread out across his belly. “You mean,” she said, cautiously, after a moment, “that you’re not--”

His breath was coming faster now and he took a moment to stare up at the tester above them, and try to get it under control. Fuck, he hadn’t meant to get _mad_ about it, that didn’t help anything. “I’m _not_ a man,” he said. “I’m not-- _male_ , I’m not _manly_ , I’m not any of that. I’m _me_ , and I’m--” But he didn’t have a good word for it.

She took a sharper breath, let it out, then took another, and assayed, “You were talking about _yourself_ , then.”

He managed to get himself together enough to look at her, at that. “What?”

“The last time,” she said. “The other-- when we brought your stuff here. Before that.” When they’d fucked, she meant-- when she’d found him getting drunk to nerve himself up to burn everything he owned that he couldn’t carry, when she’d joined him and they’d both gotten excessively drunk and had tumbled into her bed (he’d already burned his, to keep the coded tallies he’d carved in it from anybody archaeologizing about it in the future) and he had apparently talked a whole hell of a lot throughout, though he didn’t remember much of it. He mostly remembered waking up horribly hung-over while she, _far_ too chipper, hauled all of his shit through a portal to this place before cheerfully sending him on his way.

“I don’t know what I said,” he said, honest and blank with something that might have been terror.

“You said, to me, _you can just opt out of all that shit_ ,” she said. “You said _you don’t have to be anything,_ and that it’s not mandatory, and you can just-- _not_ , and I didn’t really know what you meant but Lambert, I have been thinking about it this whole time, and I don’t know what that _means_.”

She had abandoned all the kittenish sexy shit and was leaning over him looking intense and hungry, and it was attractive in a way he did not know how to process. “It means you don’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend to be anything. You can just be a person. You don’t have to be a man, you don’t have to be a woman, you can just be what feels like yourself, and it confuses other people sometimes but fuck them, it’s mostly not their business.” He had to stop to breathe; his breath was coming fast again, but it wasn’t anger. He wasn’t mad. He didn’t know what he was feeling. “It’s just that sometimes it _is_ somebody’s business because that kind of thing generally matters to people you want to fuck, and then _you’re_ fucked and not in a good way, because you have to explain it but if there aren’t words for it then how do you explain it?”

“So you’re not a man and you’re not a woman,” Keira said, and she looked weirdly excited about it, which was a damn sight better than the puzzled confusion he’d been expecting, which too often shaded off to dismissal and disgust.

“No,” Lambert said. “I mean-- _yes_. I mean that’s right, that’s what I mean. I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. I’m a person. I’m just-- me.” He mustered up his courage in the face of that expression of hers, which had gone-- really interested? He wasn’t sure what she was doing with her eyes and her jaw, there, but she was into it, that was clear enough-- and he said “So I like to wear pretty clothes sometimes, maybe like a lady, but they’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes, and my regular clothes-- they’re not man’s clothes, they’re _my_ clothes, and I pick practical stuff that’s not going to make people ask me stupid questions but-- I’m not dressed as _a man_ , I’m just dressed as _me_.”

She was staring at him, intent, and suddenly she took her hands off his chest and cradled his face between them. “I want that,” she said, staring into his face intently. “I want to be-- that. How can I be that?”

Okay, he really hadn’t expected _that_ to be what her face was doing. “You can just _be that_ ,” he said. She stared at him, wide-eyed and motionless and-- sort of ravenous, it was a little disconcerting, and he had a moment to remember that he was pinned down with his completely-unprotected belly exposed to her and she was incredibly powerful.

“How,” she said, and her hands were shaking a little.

“You just do it,” he said. “Nobody’s going to give you permission but nobody can say you can’t, either. Not really. You just do it, Keira. You just-- exist, as yourself.”

“How,” she said again, quieter and her voice was shaky now too.

“You just do it,” he said. He put his hands around her wrists and then reached up and pulled her down by the back of the neck to kiss her, a soft and sweet kiss. “You just do it. It’s all right, I’ll do it with you. We can both do it. Here, _I’m_ giving you permission: you can just do it.”

“How,” she said, a third time, and let him roll her onto her side. He lay facing her, tracing his hand along her side, from her ribs to her hip and back.

“Let’s start slow,” he said. “Just-- be naked. Let’s take everything off. No clothes. Then they’re not men’s clothes or women’s clothes or anything.”

She laughed, and she wasn’t crying but it was a little watery anyway. “That’s the most creative way a m-- anyone’s ever gotten me naked,” she said, and he heard the slip and smiled a little as she winced apologetically.

“It takes a little practice,” he said, and winked cheerfully at her. He sat up and rolled himself out of the robe and put it onto the armchair by the bed, careful to stow the knife in a sleeve, and she sat up and-- oh well, magic made that easier, and then she was naked.

“Illusions too,” he said, quietly, gently. “Just-- they’re how you think you ought to look, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” she said, and screwed her face up in trepidation.

“I don’t have to look,” he said. He closed his eyes. “That’s a whole separate thing. How people see you. You have to think about what _you_ feel, first.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to close your eyes,” she said, but she sounded wistful, or nervous, or something. He didn’t know what she sounded like except that she sounded like she didn’t want him to look at her.

“No,” he said, “I’m gonna. Actually-- a blindfold, that’d be easier.”

“I could put out the lights,” she said.

He laughed. “I can see in the dark,” he said, as gently as he could. He sat up, retrieved the robe, pulled out the sash of it, careful not to dislodge the knife, and tied it around his face. “There,” he said.

It was comfortable, was the thing. He’d done plenty of training blindfolded, there’d been a phase where Vesemir had been into that-- not just Vesemir, but now was not the time to think about that, _any_ of that-- and it had come in handy not for having been blind but because it was good to know how to compensate for a massive distraction like sightlessness.

“You don’t have to,” she said, but stopped.

“Nah,” he said, “it’s fine, it doesn’t bother me. I have other senses but like. Illusions are mostly visual. So get rid of those and start there. You sound the same, you smell the same, it’s no different to me.”

She was still, kneeling within arm’s reach as he knelt in place on the mattress. She moved her arms slightly, and the room dimmed; he could tell around the edges of the blindfold. “If I can’t see either,” she said quietly, “maybe it’ll be easier.”

“Whatever you need,” he said. “Now nobody’s looking at you and you’re not looking at you.”

His medallion buzzed, just a little bit; some minor charm. Probably, she was dispelling her illusions. He was mildly curious what her hair really looked like. His was drying, and it was probably long enough at the moment that it was going to get frizzy. He’d have to wet it down later and put something in it, but for now, well, it was dark. And the point was that nobody cared. They could get to intentionally altering appearances later. The first step was to figure out what you only did because other people were expecting it; the stuff you’d do on purpose to feel more like yourself was a bit more advanced.

“Now what?” she asked quietly, and gave a nervous little laugh.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know. I don’t actually know anything about this. I figured out pretty young that I wasn’t a boy, but I’ve been making up the rest as I go ever since.”

“Oh,” she said, and then laughed. “But you sounded so authoritative.”

He laughed too. “Did I? I’m full of shit, all the time, this is no different.” But she pretty clearly needed him to take charge, and he didn’t mind. “Well, we can talk about it, or we can fuck about it, or we can--”

“Fuck,” she said. “We can fuck. I want to do that.”

He laughed. “It _is_ why you invited me in here,” he said. “And I’ll be honest, I’m a fan. But it’s always better when it’s with somebody you’ve already explained things to. I can fuck like a man, I did before-- with you, that is-- and it’s pretty good, but it’s a lot better if I don’t have to be nervous about what you’re gonna… assume.”

“If I,” she said, and hesitated. “That is. Are-- have you. With. Um.”

He could figure that one out. “I don’t care if who I’m fucking is a man or a woman or neither,” he said. And then, the hard part. He took a breath, let it out, and said, “That close friend-- with the inside joke--”

“Was your lover,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Serious,” she said.

“Years,” he said. More than twenty.

She was quiet a moment, while he breathed through that. “I’m sorry to hear it,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. He shook his head a little, then rolled his head on his neck to loosen up. “Anyway it doesn’t matter, to me, what you are or how you fuck me, I just want you. So, however you want.”

“I want to use the strap-on,” she said. “I’ve been dying to.”

He grinned. “I would like that,” he said. “By the way. A cock doesn’t make you a man or a woman either. I got one of my own full-time and it still doesn’t mean I’m a man.” He considered that. “But if it would make you feel like one, then you should see how that feels to you.”

“Yeah,” she said, which sounded funny in her accent. She was either mocking him or mirroring him, and probably the latter, given the context. He heard sheets rustling and the mattress moved as she went to get something from, maybe a drawer from the sound of it, and then she slipped out of the bed. Fabric, movement. He had his head tilted to listen, and his hands folded in his lap. She climbed back into the bed and he rolled down off his hip and lay stretched-out on his back, half-curled invitingly.

“I almost want you to see what this looks like on me,” she said.

“I admit to curiosity,” he said. “But why don’t we wait? I’m fine with using other senses for this.”

She laughed, and came and nestled herself beside him, and took his mouth carefully with hers. He let her take the lead, and let her kiss him for a minute. She took his hand in hers, as if he wasn’t going to be able to figure out where she was when she was actually pressed against his side, but he wasn’t going to complain; she took his hand and put it on what he figured had to be the dildo. It felt like glass. He circled his fingers around it curiously; it was warm and there was definitely magic on it and she caught her breath and twitched. Oh yeah, she could feel with this thing.

It was a reasonable size, gently curved, fairly realistic in shape but not very detailed. He caressed it, enjoying the heft of it but missing the way skin would drag, living flesh would pulse. There had to be a spell on it; Geralt had alluded to something, one time, maybe. That had to be what Keira had gone to Yennefer for.

As if she’d heard the thought, Keira said, “Yennefer gave me a spell to tie it in to my nerve endings so it really feels like--”

He pressed his thumb under the head of it, such as it was, and gave a little twist with his hand, and she broke off with a gasp. “Oh,” she said. “That’s--”

“Different when it’s somebody else’s hand,” he filled in.

“Yes,” she said.

“You want my mouth?” he offered, and her breath caught. _Yeah_ she did. He grinned at her, and slid down the bed a little ways. “Hey do you want me to touch you anywhere, or not, or should I just stick to this?”

“You,” she said, “you can touch-- whatever you want,” but she clearly was pretty thoroughly distracted and hadn’t thought about that. He’d have to be careful.

He got himself comfortably settled and ran his tongue over the end of it. It was warm, body temperature, but it was glass, unyielding and tasting of nothing, which was too bad. But it did move with her; he could feel all her responses through its movements, with how closely the end of it was clearly riding against her body. She must have it fastened on well, and he did wish for a moment that he could see it. But there’d be time for that later.

It was a while since he’d done this. No, he wasn’t going to count out how long it had been. No. He wiped his mind clean and set to work in earnest, and she went from breathing harshly to making soft little noises to making louder noises, and put her hands in his hair. He stuck to mostly touching the dildo with his mouth and hands, and used his hands to hold her by the hips and to stroke her outer thighs and to grab her ass. Nothing sensitive, though he really wanted to slide his fingers into her cunt because he could smell how wet she was, _gods_ , she smelled so fucking good he could have just devoured her. But he was on-task here.

She was trembling and making little whimpering noises and he finally pulled off to say “Can I put my fingers in you” when he couldn’t stand it anymore, and she sobbed “ _please_ ” and he jammed his thumb against her clit and slid two fingers right in her cunt and she bucked against his hand and shoved her cock down his throat and came, hard, too breathless to make much noise.

He swallowed her, eyes blissfully closed, her hands tight in his hair and her cunt clenching around his fingers, and he thought a little wistfully about how good she smelled and how good she’d taste and how this glass dildo didn’t taste like anything, but really, he wasn’t complaining. This was fairly perfect, as evenings went, and the aching throb of his neglected cock was a delightful little promise of more to come.

“Fuck,” she gasped, “ah fuck,” and pried her fingers out of his hair, petting him. “Gods--” and she collected herself a little, pulling back a bit; her cock slid out of his throat but he chased it a little to keep it in his mouth, pressing the flat of his tongue to the underside of the, well, sort of head. She caressed his face, tracing her fingers along his jaw; he turned his head a little, let her cock bulge his cheek out so she could feel it. “Ah, such a good cocksucker,” she said, and then paused. “Do you like-- should I say things like that?”

Lambert was so hazy with lust it was a struggle to talk, but he managed an “mm-hmm” pretty distinctly, which was rather good work on his part he thought.

“Lovely,” she said, which was-- was she calling _him_ lovely? He’d like that. He should’ve told her what kind of things he liked. He wasn’t now, he wasn’t really up to talking, but fuck, he wished she’d sit on his face, he’d like that. No, that wasn’t the point of this. He couldn’t remember what the point of this was. He was so turned-on he couldn’t think straight but he also didn’t care if he ever actually got off, this felt so good.

“Ah, come here,” she said, and pulled her cock out of his mouth, but then replaced it with her mouth, and she was lying on top of him now and he rolled over for her and ran his hands over her body and then she had her cock next to his cock, so he grabbed them both in his hand and stroked them, together, and she made a really great noise.

“Fuck,” she said, “you’re-- oh, it’s so hot--” and he knew she meant the temperature. He bit her lip, gently so as not to break the skin with his sharp teeth, and used that to tug her mouth back to his.

She shuddered in his grip, and he was getting close, from this, but he figured she probably wanted to try some other stuff. He reached deep down and mustered some words, and said, “Did you want to fuck me?”

“Yes,” she said, and collected herself. “Can I?”

“Assume you know how this works,” he said. Words were really, really hard; he’d gone away, in his head, in a good way but not a talking way. Tricky, because she probably needed some talking through this. Shit.

“I do,” she said, endearingly earnest. Lambert had assumed, from the way she’d reacted when he’d first brought up strap-ons in general, that she was an old hand at this, but this earnestness along with some other little clues he was just adding up were suggesting to him that perhaps not. Anyway he’d been extremely both drunk and credulous when he’d suggested it; he wouldn’t have known false bravado from genuine blasé unconcernedness if it’d actually smacked him in the face with a paddle with its name carved on it.

Oh, he was in for it, but, fuck, he’d had worse, and he was well-stocked with healing potions, and if nothing else it’d be a hell of a story. Sheer willingness got you pretty far, in this kind of shit.

“C’mon,” he said blurrily, rolling onto his back and pulling his knee to his chest.

She laughed, and pulled away briefly, and came back with-- well, from the sound of the stopper coming out of it, a glass container of something, so she at least knew about lubrication, that was a good start. His medallion buzzed lightly and he managed not to be alarmed by that; he was so tired and he was so out of his own head that he just let it roll over him.

She kissed him, and the glass container had a pleasantly light herbal scent, some kind of oil, on her fingers, her fingers pressing into him, maybe she did know what she was doing. It felt good. He let himself make an encouraging noise, and she pressed her body against him-- her tits were so soft, they felt fantastic against his chest, and he wanted to hold them in his hands but he was still paying enough attention to remember that she might not want that, that might be calling too much attention to them, so he petted her soft skin instead, her flank and her ribs. He liked how feminine she was, her light build and curves and softness and all that, but it wouldn’t be that hard to think of her more neutrally if she wanted, to pay more attention to her clever hands and her sturdy thighs and all that. It wasn’t like he needed her to be feminine to find her attractive, when her real main draw was how powerful and competent she was.

He needed to find some words, let her know this was working for him. “Yeah,” was all he managed, tilting his pelvis up to her, his head tipping forward a little to counterbalance.

She wrung a couple of more enthusiastic sounds out of him, but no further words; that well was about dry. But maybe she did know what she was doing. He was breathing hard now, his slow heartbeat full-force, and her clever hands were unlocking all sorts of things he’d forgotten about himself. It was more intense with a blindfold on, easier to slip out of himself and just be a thing that felt things, passive and receptive.

He remembered she’d wanted him to take charge. He wasn’t doing a very good job at it. He touched her with his hands, pressed himself against her, tugged at her. _Come on_ , but the words couldn’t get from his mind to his mouth, some thick barrier had formed between thought and tongue and he couldn’t press through.

“You like that?” she murmured. “Are you ready?”

“Mm,” he said, and she laughed, a soft rich noise, sweet-- with him, not at him-- and rolled over, more of her slight weight on him-- he had a moment wishing she were bigger, missing someone bigger, no time for that now. No time. He could smell her, even if he couldn’t see her, and he knew who she was, there was no confusion here.

She was so careful, pushing into him, and she wasn’t clumsy, but-- he knew, then, that she’d never done this with anyone else but she’d practiced, somehow. Of course she’d practiced, she’d found some way to coach herself through doing it perfectly because her most existential terror was to be caught not knowing how to do something she was expected to know. Her teachers must’ve been terrors, to get her so conditioned like that. But, oh, she was correct, she was exact, and she made her technically flawless entrance and he shivered and took it, tingling pleasantly.

“Yeah,” he said, with great difficulty, “fuck,” and she followed the instruction and set to it with practiced ease of the over-earnest sort one could only ever really develop through diligent solo practice.

She was so fucking cute. He grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her down until he could reach her to kiss her, though he completely lacked the coordination to do so, so instead he just sort of messily mouthed at her neck.

She fucked him with increasing sincerity and decreasing precision, which ironically enough worked well for him-- he liked knowing that she was definitely enjoying herself. After a bit she was making these fantastic little noises and her thrusts were going all shivery, and he held her and fondly bit her shoulder.

“Okay,” she said, “okay,” like a little pep talk to herself; she was trying not to come too soon. It didn’t matter, it wasn’t like this hunk of glass was going to go soft, but he understood the idea anyway. He wrapped his legs around her and tilted his hips up; he was getting there, himself. Not much longer. “Are you-- is it--”

“Yeah,” he said, “just--” and he grabbed onto his dick. He didn’t have to do much, he just hung on and kept moving along with her and oh, sure, that got him there, directly enough-- he made a punched-out kind of groan and came, a pretty good orgasm that shook him all through and set her off into a shivering spate of broken little thrusts and some great gasping whimpers.

Eventually she settled down and he thought he might just melt through the mattress and wind up under the bed. He just lay there, breathing hard, and after a bit she moved away, his medallion buzzed real lightly and she came back and cleaned him up with-- just some cloth, not magic or anything-- and then she laughed and pushed him around so she could pull back the covers on the bed and they could get in it, and he managed to make himself move even though he felt like he had melted and weighed about a ton.

Her fingers were cool and deft as she unwound the blindfold, and he blinked and squinted in the dim room. “Are you still there?” she murmured.

“Yeah,” he managed.

“Was that okay?”

He turned his head and caught her mouth and kissed her, and she kissed him back tenderly, all sweet and gentle. “Mm,” he said.

“I liked that a lot,” she said. Ah, fuck, now she wanted to talk. That was a problem. “That was-- it made me feel really good.”

“Mm,” he said.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said fondly, and wow nobody had _ever_ called him _that_ before. She gathered him in her arms, pulling the blankets up to shelter him, and held him against her chest like she was big and he was small and nobody held him like that, that wasn’t how this worked. “You’re so tired, poor thing. We don’t have to talk.”

“Mm,” he said, wanting to protest-- it wasn’t that he was tired, but. Well. He was exhausted, actually, and not just physically. Nobody had held him like this in literally years, and he’d been beaten up by so many things and he felt so _bruised_ , to be coddled like this almost _hurt_. His chest felt weirdly hollowed out and-- ah fuck, was he _crying_? That made no sense.

Fuck, he-- what the _fuck._ He shoved his face into her shoulder and hung on as tears seared at the corners of his eyes, and she noticed, of course she fucking noticed, and tightened her arms around him.

“Lambert,” she said, soft and alarmed, “oh, did I hurt you?” which was fucking absurd. He shook his head and clamped down on his breathing, squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, sweetheart. Oh, my sweetheart. Oh no. Come here.”

He pressed his face harder into her shoulder and the bedding, trying to get himself back under control, and she petted his hair, the back of his neck, his shoulders. “It’s all right,” she murmured, like he was some kind of child or idiot. “You’re safe here. Just let me hold you.”

“It’s not,” he managed, words thick and clunky, “-- _you_ , it’s _not_ \--” but it was easier for a sob to get out than words, and he didn’t want to sob like a child, so he clamped down again.

“Shh,” she said, “it’s okay, I know I didn’t hurt you, but plenty of things did so let’s just-- hold on, for a bit. You’re safe here. Let it out.” No, he wasn’t fucking letting _shit_ out, but he didn’t have much choice but to hold on. She was warm, and she was soft, and maybe she’d throw him out later for being useless but at the moment it suited her not to do that so he was going to take advantage of that and shed all this stupid vulnerability into these soft expensive sheets.

It passed after a while, or got less bad, and he lay there with dry eyes open into the darkness under her sheets and just breathed while she petted his back.

“Did he die or leave?” she murmured, and he knew he couldn’t get away with a _who_? so he lay quietly for a moment, gathering himself.

“Die,” he said. He swallowed. “Murdered.”

“Not too long ago,” she guessed.

“No,” he said. Long enough. It was coming up on three years now, fuck.

“I’m the first one since then,” she guessed.

No. Maybe. Certainly. “...yeah,” he said.

“And a lot of other bad shit has happened in the meantime,” she said.

He just laughed humorlessly at that, but it had broken the lock on his tongue, maybe. Or maybe not.

“I have you,” she said softly. “You’re safe now.”

He breathed for a little longer, and then said, “Sorry.”

“No,” she said, soft but intense, “no, Lambert, it’s-- thank you,” and he supposed he could kind of get that. Probably made her feel a lot less dumb about all the shit he’d had to explain to her, he knew it’d’ve made him feel better in her place.

Had to watch that, though. He wasn’t good at sex without feelings and this was why, and this was feelings, and that was probably going to get him killed, if his understanding of the world for the last like hundred years had given him any sense of how things worked.

Well, it’d have to get in line with all the other shit that was likely to get him killed, so.


	3. Replica of a Replica

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some fleeting, mild dysphoria in one spot.

Keira woke a bit blearily to someone shredding the wards on her bedroom, from the _inside_ , which was alarming for precisely as long as it took her to remember that Lambert was here. She sighed and rolled over; he’d wandered straight out through the wards without ever seeming to notice they were there (hadn’t his medallion alerted him? She needed to research those some more) and was in the kitchen, apparently casting cantrips.

She rolled out of bed, taking a moment to smooth the sheets back into place and smiling a little as she remembered how sweet and tired and vulnerable Lambert had been for her the previous night. The normal thing for her to do next would be to update and refresh her cosmetic illusions and get dressed, but she hesitated at the looking-glass on the wardrobe.

Her hair was frizzed askew, her complexion uneven, her face puffy with sleep, and it was stupid of her to even think she was anything other than an incomplete woman at best so it was stupid of her to pretend it didn’t matter what she looked like. She scowled, raised her hand to put her practiced illusions back on, and then just-- didn’t. Fine. Fine, it was daylight, let Lambert get a look at what she really looked like so he could laugh at her.

He’d let her see him cry. If he was going to laugh at her--

Well, it was best to assume he wouldn’t, and she’d make other plans if the situation changed.

Thus composed, she pulled on some loose trousers and a breastband and a shirt, the sort of clothing she normally only wore if she were planning to put illusions on over the top. No one ever saw her like this; she rarely even saw herself like this.

It was too much, she had to pause to brush her hair at least.

But then she went out and found that Lambert was wearing her green robe, looking puffy-faced and a bit bruised, but still absently sashaying around so that the skirt swished, so unlike his normal body language that it made Keira smile in delight and lean on the door frame.

He was cooking breakfast, clearly having reconnoitered the room and the pantry and cold cellar. He’d already assembled something in a bowl and was poking at the fire-- ah, that was the cantrip she’d felt him casting earlier, the one that lit fires, because this one was burning merrily along as if this house had a scullery maid who’d been up to lay the fire hours ago. He’d gone through the pans this house had come with and had retrieved a flat one and had it on the cooktop, a section of the hearth Keira herself had never used-- it was built up with stones in the front to shield the user from the heat, the fire went around behind it, and it held a pan or pot directly over the fire in such a way that someone could work in the pan over high heat without suffering too much themselves. Lambert had said it was a nice thing to have but she wouldn’t know; she’d kept it in good repair, at least, along with the rest of the house.

Currently, he was perched on a low stool in front of it dropping dollops of lard into the pan with a spoon, to melt in the heat, and it smelled fantastic.

“Morning,” he said, not turning to look at her. “Hotcakes?”

Keira pushed off from the door and came closer. “Is that supposed to be a pet name?”

“No, that’s what I’m making,” he said. “I was asking if you wanted any.”

The only thing she really knew how to cook was porridge so she usually ate that for breakfast. Even that, she tended to make in a giant pot once a week and keep under preservation charms so she could just reheat it. “I don’t know what those are,” she said.

“I’ve made them for you before,” he said, “and you didn’t object, so I’ll just go ahead and assume you’ll eat them.”

“A fair assumption,” she said.

He glanced up at her then, looking fond. His eyes moved over her hair, his expression unchanging, and his lips quirked and he said, “When you said your hair was frizzy I thought you really meant frizzy. _My_ hair is frizzy.”

His hair was a wild tangle, sticking up every which way, with a distinct tendency toward the side he’d slept on; he’d clearly taken only the most cursory of swipes at it. Greatly daring, she stepped closer and touched it, and when he didn’t move away or object, she petted it, combing her fingers gently through it.

“I think it’s cute,” she said.

“Cute, my _ass_ ,” he said. “If I don’t deal with it it’ll knot up and I’ll have to cut it off real short. But I figured, breakfast first.”

He stood with easy grace, snagged the bowl off the table, and returned to his perch, dropping spoonfuls of the batter onto the pan and flattening them with the back of the spoon in a practiced gesture.

It smelled wonderful. He clearly knew what he was doing; in a matter of moments he pulled several finished little cakes out of the pan, browned nicely on both sides, and put them onto a wooden trencher. She stood and watched him for a moment, and then a twinge to the wards made her focus intently on the front door.

Lambert twitched too-- his medallion?-- and looked over at her. “Did you do that?”

“No,” she said. She went to the door and cast a small spell to make part of the door one-way transparent so she could peek out without opening it.

No one was there, but a small package wrapped in black brocade fabric and tied with a lilac-colored ribbon was sitting there. It had the unmistakable shimmer of Yennefer of Vengerberg’s magic about it, as well.

“Hm,” she said, and opened the door cautiously. No one was outside. Yennefer had clearly magicked the package into place. There was something about it that suggested to Keira that it was an automatic response to something, and a quick and dirty spell of scrying between her fingers revealed this to be the case: the spell had been set up a while ago and then had been triggered by some event or condition.

She took the package in and set it down on the table. Lambert had returned to his cooking, and glanced over at her with mild interest. “What’s that?” he asked. “Was someone there?”

“No,” she said. She gestured at it. “Take a wild guess who’d be apparating a package magically onto my doorstep wrapped in black and purple.”

Lambert gave the package another look, keener this time. “I don’t-- know?” he said. But he sniffed the air, and made a face, and said, “Yennefer.”

Keira couldn’t smell anything, but that was a very Witchery thing of him to do, she thought.

No hazards were apparent, so she carefully untied the ribbon and unfolded the fabric to reveal a beautifully-carved wooden box with a catch that had some little frisson of magic around it. Keira frowned at it, peered through another little scrying spell: it was locked, magically, and could only be opened by…

Her. It was obvious, from the spell: it was waiting for her… thumbprint.

She laid her thumb against the catch and it clicked and opened. She had a defensive spell ready in her other hand, nonchalantly; Lambert had kept cooking and was watching her sidelong, pretending to be more casual than he was.

But when nothing happened, she cautiously lifted the lid. The interior of the box was lined in brilliant crimson velvet, and there was an object nestled there, wrapped in straps of black leather studded with white metal.

She carefully unwrapped it, and realized that it was--

None other than a replica, presumably, of the replica of Geralt’s cock, with a harness designed to look somewhat like Geralt’s armor, very similar to but not quite identical to the one she’d seen in Yennefer’s bedroom.

She laughed, and laughed, and eventually Lambert demanded to know what was so funny.

Keira wasn’t really going to wonder how, precisely, Yennefer had managed to ascertain when she’d used the dildo or the spell, specifically on Lambert, but she clearly had done so.

“Well,” she said. “Breakfast first, but--”

He came and looked over her shoulder. “What the fuck,” he said. “That’s a cock.”

“It’s not just any cock,” she said. She put it back into the box, and gently closed the lid. “Darling, I will be absolutely delighted to explain this to you, but it will have to wait until after breakfast.”

* * *

It wasn’t until after lunch, really, that she even thought about it; they were separately occupied most of the morning, he vanishing into the room where his things were stored and opening boxes, and she leaving him in privacy to sort through things, after noticing the way he froze as he noticed the trunk that was Vesemir’s belongings Eskel had told them to take. She’d decided that wasn’t her business, and had gone to take care of some time-sensitive things in her workshop.

She’d also started work with that cockatrice eye, which was indeed a fantastically useful and expensive little treat, and opened up a number of possibilities for her.

She wandered back out a little after midday, smelling food, and found that he was cooking again. His hair was combed and slicked back and he looked tired and beaten-down, his eyes a little reddened as if he’d been crying or sleeping. And he was wearing a pair of impractical, un-armored trousers with laces up the sides that had to be purely decorative, and an embroidered blouse that might have originally been made for a woman, though it fitted him well. And over that, he had a plain, workmanlike smock-style apron, but it had a narrow band of bright embroidery across the top.

She realized self-consciously that at some point during the morning she had absent-mindedly cast an illusion to fix her hair. She’d simply forgotten not to bother. But she was still in her boring clothes, the clothes she wore for work when she knew either no one would see her or she’d have time to cast an illusion of something more suitable over the top.

She hadn’t done that, at least. She smoothed her hand uneasily over her illusory-perfect hair, and he glanced up at her, gaze lingering on her hand, then traveling over her and away. “Hey,” he said. “You don’t have any bread dough in this house.”

“I don’t,” she said. “Ought I to?”

“If you want bread, yeah,” he said. “Takes a few days to get started so it’ll rise itself.”

“I have bread,” she said. “There’s a box of it. There’s a preserving charm on the box, you can just pull out one loaf at a time, and then it’s fresh.” Baking bread was a kind of witchcraft she knew nothing of. She’d always bought it already-baked.

“Hm,” he said, clearly unconvinced. He was stirring something around in the bottom of one of her pots, and it smelled fantastic-- onion, in fat, and maybe some other vegetables and herbs, she wasn’t sure. “Well, this is going to take me another quarter of an hour, at least. I--” He stopped short, staring at something. She looked down, and laughed.

“I told you,” she said. “I wear real shoes sometimes.” She was wearing soft-soled shoes meant only for indoor wear, made of sturdy embroidered felt with woven wrapping bands. They were warm and comfortable and meant she didn’t have to think about her feet as long as she didn’t go outside.

He was wearing indoor shoes too, she noted-- sheepskin, maybe, with leather thongs wrapped around. Actually they might be the linings of sturdier boots. He looked comfortable, and… for the first time maybe she could understand that he wasn’t just all words about not being a man. He wasn’t wearing anything overtly feminine, but he certainly didn’t look the way she was used to, in armor and the like. He was still broad-shouldered and capable-looking but something about him was softer. More comfortable. He didn’t even look like this at Kaer Morhen-- except, maybe, he did; she’d only been there during a crisis, so she didn’t know what normal winters were like there.

“I like your shirt,” she ventured. The embroidery was birds and flowers, a traditional pattern, skillfully-worked but in inexpensive materials. Like someone’s peasant grandma would do. Unpretentious. Pretty, but not ostentatious. The embroidery on the apron was much simpler, a thin geometric line in bright red.

He shot her a little half-smile. “Thanks,” he said. He was-- shy, that was shyness, which wasn’t something she’d ever expected him to even be capable of.

She sat down at the table. “Can I help?” she asked. “I don’t know how to cook, but I can do simple tasks if given adequate directions.”

He gave her a skeptical glance. “No,” he said, “I have this handled.” He lifted the lid of another pot, which was just water, just coming to a boil, and then he picked up a board and pushed the things on the board into the boiling water. They were pale, like dough maybe; she couldn’t tell.

“I didn’t know I owned a slotted spoon,” Keira mused, picking it up from where it lay on the table. It was a nice carven one with a twisting pattern carved into the handle, well-seasoned.

“You don’t,” Lambert said, “that’s mine.”

She laughed. “Well,” she said. “Then I won’t touch it,” and she put it back down.

He took it from her and stirred the onion pot, then poked at the boiling water pot for a moment. “I mean,” he said. “You’ve, uh. Thanks for. Uh.” She waited patiently, and finally he managed to say, “Thanks for storing all my stuff for me.”

She smiled. That was an easy one. “Thanks for finding me a safe place to stay,” she said. “Everyone here has been lovely.”

He made a quiet sort of grunting noise, watching the pots, one hand on his hip and the other tapping the spoon thoughtfully against his own shoulder, elbow bent. He was watching the boiling pot; the things he’d slid into it had started to float up to the surface, and he used the spoon to skim them off the boiling water and then dump them into the pot with the onions and things, where they sizzled. He took the boiling pot off the fire and set it carefully down to one side, and then stirred the other pot for a little, and then took it off the fire and set it onto a trivet on the table.

“Well,” he said, “there’s food. I raided your pantry a bit. I don’t usually do anything so fancy for midday but I didn’t find the bread and I felt like something hot.”

“You need to put on some weight anyway,” she said, “don’t you?”

“I do,” he said. He retrieved a couple of wooden bowls, and dished whatever it was that he’d made onto them, and spooned something over the top, something creamy-- a soft cheese or a yogurt of some kind. He must have brought that, she hadn’t been keeping any in the house. She had some hard cheeses, as those were easier to keep with or without preservation charms. “It’s weird,” he said in a moment, “making… home food for just two people.”

“You cook for just yourself all the time,” she said.

“Camp food,” he corrected. “I make that for just me. And I’m not saying I don’t do home food for small numbers, it’s just taken me a long time to get the hang of it. I learned how to do this for, like, fifty. It’s weird, that’s all.”

 _Almost all of my friends are dead too_ , Keira thought; Radovid had murdered most of them, and all the students at Aretuza and half the instructors. But it wasn’t helpful to point that out. “Well,” she said, “I’ll take care of dinner.” _You’re lucky they taught you to cook_ , she thought, but then, she could always buy a book and teach herself. She was seventy-five years old and had more education than almost anyone else in the world, it was stupid of her to act helpless. If she wanted to learn to cook, she could do that, but she had no need.

Especially not if he hung around.

He laughed. “You do that,” he said. “I like your magic dinners. I want to ask, when you vanish the pot, do you clean it first?”

She shrugged. “Eventually, it gets cleaned,” she said. The food had cooled enough so she began to eat it. It was quite good; onion and cabbage and carrots and turnips browned in fat and softened, and the things from the pot were a kind of dumpling or noodle he’d then fried a little, and the cheese added a lovely salty tang to the whole thing. “What’s this called?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “But there’s eggs in the dumplings. Glad those chickens are laying for you.”

She did have chickens. The stable boy fed them and collected the eggs for her. They were the chickens from the last of Kaer Morhen’s flock and she’d never really thought about it but it was aesthetically pleasant to have them scratching around in the garden. She’d probably have to start buying in more eggs, though; Lambert would certainly need to eat a lot.

“They don’t lay much,” she said.

“No,” Lambert said, “they don’t in winter.”

They finished eating, and she used magic to clean up, and Lambert leaned his chin in his hand and looked amusedly fond at the whole thing. “It’s convenient,” she said. “For your information I _do_ know how to do dishes the regular way. I just don’t see the need to bother.”

“Fair,” he said. He yawned. “What’s a mage do to pass a long winter?”

She laughed. “I’ve a list of commissions and charms and things, I just work my way through. It’s not like I have to worry about getting snowed in; I can portal to Toussaint if I need provisions.”

“Hardly keeping a low profile,” he said. She shrugged. “Also, that’s cheating.”

She laughed. “It is not,” she said. “Anyway what’s a Witcher spend the winter doing?”

“Home improvements and naps,” Lambert said. “Potions too, I suppose, but I don’t have a great stock of supplies. There’s time to get those from town before the snow comes, though, that’s part of the reason I came so early.”

“Lambert,” she said, “whatever you need, I probably have.”

“Gear repair,” he concluded, rather than either accepting or declining her offer. “That’s about the long and short of it.” He stretched. “I think today’s a nap day, especially if you’re doing dinner.”

“A nap,” she said. “Oh, do you want me to explain Yennefer’s present?”

He gave her a keen look. “Maybe,” he said, “but I don’t know if I trust you to fuck me with anything Yennefer of Vengerburg gave you.”

Keira laughed. “Too late for that,” she said.

* * *

She had intended to make a whole funny production out of the replica of the replica, but instead somehow she wound up lying naked in her bed with Lambert still half-dressed (wearing nothing but the shirt, but the tails were long) sitting next to her contemplating her. He’d untied the neck of it, and it sat open, framing his collarbones, bright and unpretentious and cheerful.

“Even without illusions,” Keira said, and this was probably the first time he’d ever seen her completely without illusions, “I just look like a woman, I should just-- accept that I’m-- for all intents and purposes a woman and that’s how it is, but--”

“It’s not about what you _look_ like,” he said, and ran his hand contemplatively over her ribs and up over her breast. She didn’t have to use illusions on her breasts, they’d been made perfectly during her transformation at Aretuza. “It doesn’t matter what you look like.”

“Those are fake,” she said, “but they’re not illusions.”

“Fake,” Lambert said. He caressed her breast with more attention. He was hard, she could tell; they’d been making out fairly intensely a moment ago-- but he wasn’t making anything of it, he was just sitting there, letting her talk. “How do you mean fake?”

“I mean, they’re really there,” she said, “but I didn’t grow them. I didn’t have breasts. I didn’t-- develop, like a woman. I was nineteen already and I wasn’t a woman, they made me one.”

“And you don’t like what they chose,” Lambert said.

“I chose this,” she said. “I did. I chose it. I described what I wanted and they made exactly that.”

“But you didn’t really think you had an option,” he said.

“No,” she said. She pulled up an illusion, cast it on herself, gave herself a flat chest. Lambert blinked, cocked his head, looking.

“Is that better?” he asked.

“No,” she said, squirming in dissatisfaction; she didn’t like it. He caressed her, the illusion seamless enough that it looked and felt like she really had-- it wasn’t really a man’s chest, she hadn’t gone that far, hadn’t given herself any kind of different body shape. She hadn’t developed into a man, either, as a teenager; she just hadn’t… looked like anything but a skinny teenager. She didn’t remember looking like this. She’d had the same breasts for fifty or more years, now. She squirmed again, and Lambert took his hand away. He wasn’t any less hard, though, she thought, and that helped. “This isn’t me either.”

“Maybe don’t use illusions yet,” Lambert said. “Maybe just let yourself be whatever you are. You’re starting from a place where you thought you had to be, but that doesn’t mean that none of it’s any good.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, or use the illusions, maybe they’ll help.”

“Would you still fuck me?” she asked. “If I looked like this? If I wasn’t a woman?”

“Yes,” he said, “if you wanted. It doesn’t really matter to me, Keira.”

She dismissed the illusion. “I like them, though,” she said, and held her breasts in her hands. They were nice, they’d never done her any wrong, they behaved how she told them to, and people looked at them and thought about them and forgot to plot against her. Mostly.

He laughed. “I like them too,” he said. She moved one hand out of the way, an invitation, and he put his hand on her breast, caressing it gently at first and then with a bit more intent.

“When did you first know?” she asked.

“Know what?” In the dim light his pupils were rounder, less strange, but she was getting used to them anyway. She’d been attracted to him first because he was strange and exotic but the more she knew him the more she just liked him and didn’t think him strange anymore.

“That you,” she said, and gestured vaguely. “Weren’t a boy.”

He shrugged. “I just knew,” he said. “I wasn’t-- what my dad expected, I wasn’t-- whatever it was, I wasn’t it. I was something else. I was interested in the wrong stuff. I wanted the wrong things. What he expected-- and other people too, it wasn’t just him...” He trailed off, and shrugged again. “You?”

“I was born-- wrong,” she said. “When I was-- right away, the midwife knew I wasn’t-- either thing. I didn’t understand it for a long time, but-- she told them they’d better just raise me a girl, I wouldn’t amount to anything as a man, but I wouldn’t be a _useful_ girl, I wouldn’t be able to be anyone’s wife. I wasn’t going to amount to anything. It was a shock to everyone when I turned out to have powers, turned out to be worth something.”

He was quiet, thinking of that, and then he bent and kissed her gently. “I hope you told them to fuck off when they tried to use you once you were useful,” he said quietly.

She laughed. “I did,” she said. “Hey, no more talking.”

“No more talking,” he said.

* * *

“I _like_ my body like it is,” she said breathlessly, squirming; she was so close, and his fingers were so clever, and his tongue, “I do, I wouldn’t change it--”

“Shh,” he paused a moment to say, and then dived back in.

“Fuck,” she said, and came, wrapping her thighs around his head. “Ah, fuck, Lambert--”

* * *

“You don’t have to change anything,” he said patiently, but she could feel the faint trembling that had started in his spine; he was close, now. He was holding back and being so patient. She was in his lap, having decided it was his turn to fuck her, and he’d let her take as much as she needed to get off a couple more times, and she was really enjoying herself but she was also really enjoying the way he was fighting to keep control, buried to the hilt inside her and trying very hard not to let her wring him over the edge.

“I don’t,” she said, bringing the fingers she’d been touching herself with up and putting them in his mouth. He opened for her, eyes going a bit glazed. “But maybe I will.”

“Mm,” he said, sucking on her fingers; his hands were digging in at her hips and he was breathing harder. He was really close.

“Can you hold off any longer, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Nn,” he said, a shiver going through him. He was so biddable in bed, was the thing; out of it, he was contrary and spiky and ridiculous, but once his dick got involved-- that wasn’t fair or true, he’d been nothing but supportive to her all day, but it was still funny how talky he was everywhere but in bed.

She laughed, delighted, and ground herself down against him, shivering pleasantly at the deep sensation of fullness, and he trembled again, hissing a breath in around her fingers, screwing up his face as he tried to hold off. He knew she didn’t want him to finish in her, knew she didn’t like the sensation of it afterward-- she’d told him that first time when they’d fucked drunk and hadn’t expected him to listen but he had, and that was why she’d bothered fucking him again, had bothered helping him, had bothered staying in touch at all, because even drunk and generally fucked-up as he’d been he’d listened to her and treated her body like she’d asked him to.

“All right,” she said, and pushed herself up far enough that he slid out, reclaimed her wet fingers to wrap around him, and rubbed his cock against the soft flesh of her belly. He made a fantastic noise, high-pitched and breathy and vulnerable, and buried his face in her shoulder and after just another moment came all over her.

“There you are, sweetheart,” she murmured, petting his hair with her other hand. “So good to me.”

He whimpered again, a little more together, and it turned into a breathlessly self-deprecating laugh. No, he wasn’t going to fall all apart and cry again. She kissed his forehead, and then kissed his mouth when he turned his face up to her.

“You good?” he asked in a moment, pulling back to look into her face.

She laughed. “Yes,” she said, and kissed him.

* * *

It wasn’t until the next day that they got around to Yennefer’s gift.

“Wait,” Lambert said, unable to pull his gaze away from the astonishingly-realistic-looking dildo, “that’s really-- are you-- for real?”

“I mean,” Keira said, “yes. It’s a replica Yennefer made of Geralt’s cock.” She tilted her head, and ran her hand along it, with a delicious little shiver at how it felt. “I assume you’ve seen the real thing in the flesh, so--”

“No,” Lambert said, sitting back on his heels. He was in a sleeveless shift and a pair of extremely cute lace-trimmed underpants, in the style of women’s underwear but perfectly tailored to fit him. He apparently owned a fair amount of clothing like this, and Keira was extremely intrigued but trying not to come on too strong about it. He looked fucking fantastic in lace panties, as it happened, and the way they were only occasionally visible under the hem of the shift was extremely distracting.

“No?” Keira blinked at him in astonishment. She herself was wearing nothing but the dildo harness. “I thought all you sort of-- well I don’t know what I thought,” she confessed. She considered it a moment. “I didn’t think there was anyone that Geralt hadn’t slept with, though.”

Lambert laughed. “Not me,” he said. “I know I told you that because then you teased me so much for interrogating you about what it was like.”

“I did,” she mused. “Sorry, I was quite drunk, I had forgotten.”

“You made up wild tales about the whole thing,” Lambert said. He was still staring at it. “I thought it’d be bigger. You said it was.”

“I did say that,” she said. “No, I mean, it’s respectable,” and she stroked it, “but he’s not some monster or something.” She shook her head. “You’ve really never-- I guess you guys are like brothers.”

Lambert made a face, scrunching up his nose in a way that showed off his crooked teeth. He had one unusually large eyetooth that tended to make his expression crooked so that he looked sarcastic, and it had taken her a while to realize that it was just the physical shape of his mouth that was doing that. “I mean,” he said, “not necessarily, but. Geralt met me when I was a kid and I guess he can’t not think of me as a kid, is the most I could understand of when we sort of didn’t talk about it.”

“He’s older than you?” Keira hadn’t expected that. Also she had expected this would not be quite so talky an activity, and felt a little oddly about being dressed only in a dildo harness for it. “But you seem so-- well, you seem older,” she said, as Lambert was giving her a look she couldn’t read.

“Really,” he said, and then after a pause said it again. “ _Really_?”

“Yes,” she said. “You seem more… well…” How to say it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have rendered Lambert magically unconscious upon their first meeting, but she absolutely could not have tricked him into doing a long series of tasks for her first. But as it transpired, she’d gotten everything she desired and more from him, beyond what she ever would have even imagined trying to get, so that had worked out to be better. “Geralt’s. Hmm. Gullible?”

Lambert’s expression went a little more neutral, but set, harder to read. “Somebody convinced Geralt when he was pretty young that his only value in this world is what he can do for other people,” he said.

“See,” Keira said, “things like that. I just don’t feel like he would make an analysis like that.”

“I don’t know about that,” Lambert said. “He seems to have analyzed _you_ fairly well.”

“When?” Keira said, startled.

Lambert gave one of those crooked sarcastic grins. “At Kaer Morhen,” he said. “When he showed up, and you were there? We talked about you, a little. He said he didn’t think anyone had been kind to you in a good long while, among other things.”

Keira blinked, blank. “I,” she said, profoundly disconcerted.

“It’s not that Geralt’s so gullible he won’t see through attempts at manipulation,” Lambert said. “It’s more that he’s likely to figure it out, figure out what the manipulator really wants, and do it anyway. I’m not as nice and I’d not forgive so readily.” He grinned, and she could tell there really was an edge to it, beyond the cosmetic appearance of such the tooth lent. “But I know you well enough now to know he was right.”

Keira took a moment to attempt to compose herself, not really knowing what her reaction ought to be. She hadn’t thought Geralt had cared enough to notice much about her, but in hindsight-- well, yes, he’d seemed sort of resigned about much of what he’d done for her. She hadn’t-- she’d underestimated him, and she’d realized that at the time, and she still didn’t understand why he’d been so patient about it.

“I was in rather a difficult place at the time,” she admitted. “You might even say desperate.”

“It’s been a hard couple of years all around,” Lambert said, not without sympathy, and she remembered then, he’d admitted that lover of his had been killed fairly recently. Likely within the time frame they were discussing.

“It has,” she said, contemplating, and then shivered; it was too cold in this room to be naked. She sat up, cast a spell to kick up the fire a bit, and said, “So should I change, then?”

Lambert’s gaze went keen, moving over her body and settling on the replica of Geralt’s cock. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so, I think this will be fun.” He pulled his shift off over his head and then he was just in the lacy panties, and she was so distracted by that she completely let herself stop thinking about whether Geralt of Rivia was smarter than she was or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh this was going to be the last chapter but then I realized it doesn't transition to the sequel I wanted, which was going to be about a different thing, and so I've had to tack on more chapters, which I've now spent more than a week agonizing over either adding onto this story or splitting out into a new story which then I would have to find a TITLE for and OH MY GOSH what a trial so ANYWAY as of now I'm going to just tack them onto this story but before I post I may change my mind and split it to a new story.  
> Probably I won't do that.  
> So, there's more of this, on a slightly different theme with an action pivot point but is it enough to make a separate story??? which I promise is building to a different thing, which is what the sequel is about.   
> Heck, I will probably just tack the chapters onto this story. Sorry for spending so many words agonizing about it, lol.


	4. Power Objects

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings this chapter, I don't think, though let me know if I missed anything.

When Keira staggered out of her workshop, desperate for a cup of tea, Lambert was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs working on a length of fingerloop braid tied to the back of one of the other kitchen chairs, and gave her a long look.

“Kettle’s hot,” he said.

“Oh, thank the goddess,” she said, and went over to prepare the pot.

He kept braiding, deftly tugging the weave into place as he went, never missing a pass. “You were working pretty hard in there for a while,” he said.

“Sometimes you have to just get through it,” she said. She had a headache. She’d certainly overdone it, but the things Triss had asked for were done and she could set that all aside and pass the project onward. She’d let Lambert’s arrival delay her several days, and had to make it all up now, but it was hard not to feel it was worth it.

She poured the tea into the pot. “Did you want some of this?” she asked.

“I’ll take a cup,” he said. He paused to scratch his nose, then kept braiding. All of his fingers were involved, it was a more complex pattern than Keira had ever learned. She’d only ever done that sort of thing as a child, but she could see from the skein of finished cord looped over the back of the chair that he was making these for serious use. On the table was a pile of tarnished, dented brass aiglets he’d clearly salvaged off used laces, and she surmised he was probably weaving these new ones to length to replace a worn-out set. _Gear repair_ , he’d said.

“So this is what Witchers do all winter,” she said, getting out two cups.

He laughed. “Among other things,” he said.

“Do you spin the thread too?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, you can get thread for cheap,” he said. “But nobody reliably makes laces to my tastes.”

She watched him for a moment, as the tea steeped, as her headache throbbed. “I could probably enchant the thread to do that to itself,” she mused, following the repetitive pattern of his fingers as he worked.

“Well,” he said, “I could not, so, I make do.”

“You can do magic, though,” she said. “That’s what I find so curious. You can absolutely do magic, with those little hand-spells you have-- and quite powerful magic-- so obviously you’ve got a command of chaos on some level.”

“I have,” Lambert said, “but it’s very carefully capped. The mage who invented Witchers very earnestly made sure of that. We can only use chaos the way that mage imagined we should, and no more.”

“Have you ever really explored the edges of it?” she asked, letting her tired eyes just focus on his deft hands. He was moving at a fantastic pace, with an enormous amount of skill, his hands nimble and strong and never missing a switch of the loop from one finger to another in the very specific order to make the detailed pattern both clear and strong, tugging the knots tight with rhythmic precision.

“No,” Lambert said. “I mean. Yes. I mean, well. I know where the edges are, and I know I can’t move them. We all have to find our own edges. It takes years of practice to use the Signs, and you can get to higher and more intense levels of them if you master them fully, but it depends on how much power you can command at any one time and the upper end is pretty firmly in place.”

“I’ve watched you use them,” Keira said. “You have to make the shape, and then the spell just fills that shape, and it’s just really how much intensity you can put into them.” She shaped her fingers into an _Igni_ , the one she saw him do the most, and let her chaos fill the shape. It worked for her, but she had to build the spell every time. She’d watched him; he never had to build it, it was just there. Obviously it was coded-in somehow, and that was what made it so fast and so powerful, but also so inflexible.

Once it was built, and slowly, somewhat painfully filled-- she’d overdone it today, she really had-- she sent the Igni to one of the lamps on the table, which he hadn’t bothered lighting because he didn’t need it. It hit harder than the little charm she would normally have cast for such a thing, but it didn’t cause any damage, just sparked dramatically. Maybe she should do it that way-- her training was to have all her little working charms be delicate and subtle and graceful, because her training was to be ladylike even while being terrifying. Maybe she should just start slamming cantrips into things and taking up more space. That would be fun.

Lambert eyed the lamp, fingers pausing, then went back to work once he was sure it wouldn’t explode. Or... maybe not, she amended. Maybe she should try to stay unobtrusive and keep up the graceful schtick. “I mean,” he said. “Yeah, that’s how it works. You get better than that at not putting too much in when you only want a little one though. You certainly have a whole lot more chaos than I can access. I only have a little pool to work from and it goes dry all the damn time.”

“I bet it’s artificially constricted,” she said. “Witchers were created by mages who were afraid of them. I bet I could figure out how to unlock that.”

“Nope,” Lambert said. “No, Keira, it’s not good when mages decide they can do better and start fucking around in Witchers’ bodies. We’re designed to be hard to fuck with, it’s on purpose.”

Kiera poked at the teapot, feeling rejected. Well… he gave an awful lot of himself to her, it stood to reason he’d have boundaries, and this sounded like he’d seen some things. “I don’t propose to try to re-mutate you,” she said, a little offended despite her resolve not to be.

“Good,” Lambert said, “because apparently we’re really easy to re-mutate, and having been through it once I can tell you, it never works quite like you’d think it would, you always get side effects you didn’t expect, and whatever benefit you get is almost never worth it.”

Keira grimaced. “I have,” she admitted, “looked into what goes into those… mutation processes… and I concede your point.”

He gave her a long look, fingers not pausing, and then looked back down at his work. “Good,” he said, tone neutral.

“But,” she said, and he looked up again, expression very flat. “I’m just saying, what if I taught you a new shape? Do you think you could do a new shape?”

“I have enough Signs,” Lambert said, and he was reaching the end of his loops now, and started slipping his fingers out to tie off the braid.

“What if I could give you one more?” she said. “Something really useful. Something simple.”

“It wouldn’t work,” he said.

“It could,” she said. “It really could!”

“No,” he said, and licked his finger to roll a knot deftly off it. He picked an aiglet out of the bag and pried it open with the edge of the little knife lying on the table, wrapped it around the lace end, and mushed it into shape between his fingers, rolling it neatly.

“A cantrip against headaches,” she said, a little longingly, and he looked up at her again, sharp and forbidding, but then something in his expression softened.

“You’d make me a Sign I could cast to take somebody’s headache away,” he said, skeptical but not scornful.

She shrugged, and said, “It would be handy.”

He gave her a long look. “Is that something you can do?” he asked.

She swirled the pot between her hands, and then poured the tea. “Not on myself when…” She hesitated. “Well, not when it’s a headache I caused by using too much magic,” she admitted. She tilted her head back and forth. “It would only make itself worse, you know?”

“Ah,” he said. “And this happens often.”

“No,” she said, “no no.” It happened all the time, she always got absorbed and overdid things. She spent a lot of evenings with a cold compress on her forehead regretting her choices, but it never stopped her from getting herself into the situation. Sheala’d had a headache charm she used frequently, and was also clever enough that she would set the charm up and bind it to a power object, so that at the end of her working-day it was pre-set and ready to go and she could apply it to herself without expending any magical effort. But Keira never remembered to do that sort of thing either, even though she was proficient at making power objects; it never seemed important, until she already had the headache and it was too late to do it. (She took a moment to push away the grief: Sheala was dead now, tortured to death by Radovid. It was hard to adjust to past-tense and she didn’t have time to do it just now.)

No, trying to force a new cantrip into Lambert’s repertoire was probably a pretty severe transgression of his boundaries and she should abandon the idea. But--

“It wouldn’t have to just be for headaches,” she said, before she could stop herself, because now her mind was aswirl with the possibilities. It wouldn’t be all that different from constructing a power object with a pre-loaded charm in it, to come up with the framework of a spell like that, and one could do a generalized healing charm, that then would have the same sort of range of flexibility depending on the skill and intention of the caster as the other Signs he used, and it would-- she knew Witchers relied on potions for healing but those had a cost she hadn’t quite parsed out but she knew from the way he spoke of them that there was some calculation he had to do, where he had to weigh up the costs versus benefits of taking a potion or not, and this wouldn’t have the same calculus built in at all--

Well. She should stop. He was watching her, winding the length of the finished lace between his hands and making it into a compact little skein before he set it aside on the table. “No, huh,” he said carefully.

That wasn’t discouragement, but. He had very clearly stated a boundary, and she shouldn’t cross it. He wasn’t a thing for her to play with, wasn’t an experiment for her to conduct; he was a person, and she liked him, and he incredibly enough seemed to be able to put up with her, and she really needed not to wreck that. He had said, flat-out, that he was not forgiving of manipulations, and she had to not manipulate him.

“I,” she said, struggling with whether to say any more or not; he hadn’t quite asked a question, hadn’t really been encouraging her, but it had seemed like maybe an invitation to say more-- but, again, he’d said no already. He’d told her he wouldn’t put up with her pushing him around. But she really wanted to do this. “Well, I mean,” she said tentatively. “ Just a generalized-- a healing charm-- I know you use potions for that but something a little easier, and it wouldn’t-- you could use it on someone else, too, and if it was pre-built then it wouldn’t mean changing you at all, you wouldn’t need more mutations to cast it or anything like that, it’d just-- it’s--” She stopped, and then remembered she’d made him tea.

She put the pot down, picked up the teacups, carried them over to the table, and set his down within his reach, sitting in one of the remaining chairs that were uninvolved in the fingerloop braiding process.

The look he was giving her was wary, and not encouraging. But he hadn’t told her to drop it. She had a tiny bit of wiggle room, here, and the temptation was incredible to just-- cast a little spell to make him suggestible, to give herself a little more wiggle room, and-- but no. Firstly, he’d probably feel the spell, or would possibly be naturally resistant to it, and secondly even if she succeeded she’d have to explain herself later and he’d already said he wouldn’t forgive. Normally she was willing to just go for it anyway, but he’d-- he’d listened to her like nobody else, and she found herself in the unexpected position of actually really caring what he thought, for some reason.

Maybe it was that all her other friends were dead, she thought, a little bleakly; she really had no one else to turn to. Triss was probably the closest person to her still left alive, and she… well, Triss was fine, but she didn’t _trust_ her. That wasn’t how it worked, between them.

He was still watching her, and hadn’t picked up his teacup. She picked up hers, and blew on it. “Well,” she said, a little morosely. “I think it would be really interesting, and handy.” She tried a sip of the tea. It wasn’t quite scalding, but she set it down anyway as too hot to drink. “And you-- I know you sometimes have to choose between potions to win a fight and potions to survive one, and if you had an option, you know, that you could heal yourself at least a little without one, that could be a really good advantage. And anyway it would be a really fascinating exercise, to come up with something like that. That’s all.”

“You don’t have to _mope_ ,” he said, a little crossly.

She curled in on herself defensively. This was why she manipulated people. If you were honest and vulnerable with them, they invariably found you lacking, and turned on you. If you just-- controlled them, then you could keep them guessing long enough to get what you needed to get, and maybe you’d part badly but it was better that than-- well.

Well, it was a rejection, and she had enough practice accepting those; they were what she mostly got, in her life. “I’m not _moping_ ,” she said, not liking how shrill she’d gone but not really able to help it either. “I’m trying to respect your boundaries, and I’m not very good at it.”

“And,” he said, voice softer, “you have a wicked headache. Come here.”

“ _No_ ,” she said. “I’m _fine_.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to do,” he said mildly.

“It’s fine,” she insisted, and drank rather too large a mouthful of the tea, and while it didn’t scald her, it did hurt all the way down.

She scrunched her eyes shut at it, and when she opened them, Lambert had stood up and was standing next to her. “Come here,” he said, and put his big warm hand on top of her head, and then dug the fingers of his other hand in at the base of her skull, pressing cleverly on the muscles there to unlock them.

“Nngh,” she said, putting her teacup down.

He worked the fingers of both hands through her hair, pressing firmly and rubbing at her scalp, working the muscles of her head and neck in a way that made her eyes go crossed and her jaw pop open. He kept it up for a good few long minutes, and when he finally released her and smoothed her hair gently back down again, she sat dizzily trying to catch her balance. He pulled the side of her face gently against his midsection and smoothed his rough fingers over her hair and said, “Did that help at all?”

“Hnng,” she said. It had helped some. She still felt hollowed-out and sick, but it was better than before. She slid her arm around the back of him, winding up holding him just under the ass, with her hand against the outside of his thigh, and he kept petting her head. His body was so warm, and so solid, and it felt good to hang onto him even if she was annoyed at him.

“I am what I am,” he said. “I’m old and set in my ways and I’m set in my ways for really good reasons.”

She sighed. He smelled like her soap now, and she liked that, though she shouldn’t-- it didn’t make him hers. It didn’t mean she should want him to be. “I can _help_ , though,” she said.

“You don’t need to,” he said.

“There are a lot of things I don’t need to do that I want to do,” she said.

“This is a fair point,” he said.

But it wasn’t a no. He still hadn’t given a hard no.

* * *

Lambert knew his upbringing had been a little lacking when it came to acknowledging emotions and the like, but he’d figured out his own way around to keeping the peace with people, and generally knowing what was going on at any given times with the stuff people said and didn’t, and so on. Mostly where he still had trouble was with his own emotions, but he figured compared to Geralt he was doing great there. (Eskel somehow seemed to have that shit sussed right the fuck out, and that was a mystery to Lambert, how he’d managed that, but then a lot of things Eskel did were mysteries.)

Not that comparing oneself to Geralt was ever useful, in any capacity. (Not that it hadn’t been weirdly gratifying to note that his own cock was slightly thicker, if not longer, than the replica one that complete lunatic Yennefer had given Keira for some unknown reason. Lambert was harboring a suspicion that the consultation Yennefer had apparently given Keira had been more hands-on than Keira had implied, just from a few of the things Kiera had let slip.)

Anyway it didn’t take a genius so emotionally centered as to be a clear well of purity all the way down to his core to figure out that Keira had a genuine interest in learning about his Signs and had felt hurt by his rejection of the concept. She’d already put herself out for him a fair bit, and it seemed pretty obvious that she’d want him to do the same in return, and apparently having wept in her arms wasn’t really sufficient in terms of vulnerability even though Lambert was convinced it really ought to get him a free pass until eternity, because that shit had been fucking _mortifying_. But, well. He hadn’t done it intentionally, and while that made it _worse_ in his book, it did also undermine his feeling that it had been enough. Probably, she wanted him to _deliberately_ concede something to this-- whatever this arrangement was. And, probably, he admitted to himself, she was warranted in this.

Not that Lambert had any kind of experience in making himself emotionally available to anybody, but. Well, he _had_ , was the thing, and it hadn’t required that much deliberate effort. He and Aiden had worked it out largely by, well, by Aiden being thoroughly sensible and patient, and Lambert being messy. That had been their relationship.

It didn’t really hurt any less to think about Aiden than it had to not think about him, all this time. And here, Lambert had the luxury of wallowing about it if he needed to, which he did. He’d spent a morning going through that one box, of all his really private secret stuff, all the lace and embroidery and frills and such, and he’d cried over those fucking shoes, and it hadn’t really helped, but he had a few of the bits of clothing out and the way Keira’s eyes lit up when he wore anything especially pretty maybe made that worthwhile.

But that also wasn’t really enough. He wasn’t meeting her where she was.

So, he steeled himself, and went into her workshop.

She was sitting on top of the worktable with her feet crossed under her, a bowl in one hand and her other held vaguely up into the air, and her expression was one of distance and great concentration. He leaned in the doorway, wishing he’d put his armor on too-- he’d dressed in road leathers, feeling the need of some protection, though he did have one of his nicer pairs of lacy panties underneath-- and watched her for a few moments, and it vaguely crossed his mind that she perhaps would have had wards over that doorway, or something, and had not. No, he’d done right-- she’d wanted him to come in here.

But she didn’t react for a slightly awkwardly long time, and just as he was wondering if he ought to go back out and come back in again later, she blinked and shook her head slightly and looked up at him.

“Oh,” she said, startled, and then smiled in tentative delight. “Hello!”

“Hi,” he said.

The room was-- well, he’d seen some awful things in his day, as far as mage-work was concerned, some laboratories full of horrors, and cramped and filthy little workrooms, and the like. This one was cluttered but sunny, reasonably well-organized, with labels on things and charming little notes to self. Some of it was very clearly in Keira’s performing-even-for-herself aesthetic, where everything was just quirky enough to be charming with a slightly threatening under-edge. But a lot of it was straightforward and no-nonsense, which was what he privately felt like she’d be, left to her own devices and without the need to prove anything to anyone.

“Is it,” she said, and frowned. “No, it’s not late.”

“No,” he said. “I was just curious. Is it a bad time?”

“Not at all,” she said. Her gaze sharpened on him. “Curious?”

“Well,” he said, falling back on pragmatism. “You said you didn’t mind sharing some things with me, and I’ve some decocting and whatnot to do.”

“Let me give you a tour,” she said, setting down her bowl and hopping off the table.

It was a reasonably well-stocked workshop, and well laid-out, with some decent equipment. Some of the distillation apparatus from Kaer Morhen had found a new life here, whatever they could carry out of there, and it seemed strange to see it set up not in a dank leaky basement but rather in this bright sunny space. If he played his cards right, he might not have to fix a single roof leak this winter, Lambert thought, and had a moment to be inwardly delighted about it.

He eventually retrieved his saddlebags full of collected items and brought them in, and Keira set him up with a space of his own on the counter, and they did some swapping of ingredients and Lambert got a few things started to make tinctures.

“I don’t want to pry into all your secrets,” Keira said.

“So don’t,” Lambert said, before he could stop himself.

Fortunately, she laughed. “I won’t,” she said. “But I want to compare notes on some things. I won’t push you much more about my notion of how your cantrip-casting method works, I just really want to understand it so I can stop being so obsessed about it and just let it go.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” he said, a bit grudgingly.

She pulled out a book and lay it flat on the table, rolling a cover support under one side of it to keep from cracking the spine. “So,” she said. “What I was thinking is that your cantrips must work somewhat like the spells I was taught to make self-maintaining through use of power objects.”

There followed a lengthy discussion of magical methods that made Lambert remember a lot of long boring interludes in his student days, but he did learn a lot about how chaos really worked, and how spells were normally structured.

And she explained her underlying theory, which was that if she created one of these power objects and bound a specific cantrip to it, then he’d be able to use it. It seemed plausible, in theory, but most importantly it did not involve altering any parts of him, inward or outward, and so were vastly better than any of the other instances he’d encountered of mages interfering with Witchers’ abilities.

* * *

That night she showed him one of the ways she’d learned to create a power object. “One of the times people generate the most chaos that they’re not using to any particular purpose,” she said, unfastening his trousers with great and distracting focus, “is orgasm.”

“Is it now,” he said.

“And so,” she said, grinning up at him as she got his trousers open and discovered his cute panties, “ah-- these are great-- so one of the time-tested ways to really focus a lot of chaos into an object is, well.” She pushed him down on his back into the bed, and pulled a stone out from under her pillow. “The teachers told us to keep them under our pillows, but I’ve also discovered that you can just. Masturbate directly with the object, if you feel like it.”

“Well that’s… direct,” Lambert said, and then she popped the stone into his mouth. It wasn’t quite small enough that he’d swallow it without choking, but it wasn’t so large that it didn’t fit easily. He had to hold it on his tongue to keep gravity from pulling it down his throat.

“I have a suspicion that Yennefer actually has a collection of real dildos she uses for the purpose,” Keira said, “but as she only showed me some of them, well-- I have my suspicions, anyway.”

She leaned in, and kissed him, but not deeply, just brushing her tongue against his, touching the stone and pulling away. “This is a new one, I only just started,” she said, her mouth close to his.

Dimly, Lambert wondered what it was about him that made sexual partners want to push him around. He also wondered why he liked it so much. Maybe the second question answered the first. Putting the stone in his mouth had shut him up entirely and made him go a little fuzzy, but he didn’t think it was a spell; his medallion hadn’t alerted him. No, he just got like this sometimes.

“Don’t you look pretty,” Keira said, pushing up to run her hands down his body and peel his trousers down. He hitched up his hips to help, and she bit her tongue delightedly as more of him was revealed to her. “Ah, such a pretty not-a-boy,” she singsonged, tossing his trousers over the back of the chair and petting his thigh. “Aren’t you just the prettiest little thing, all wrapped up like a present for me.”

“Hnng,” he said, and flipped the stone to the side of his teeth to say, “you’re ridiculous,” but then he set the stone back down on his tongue and closed his mouth again.

“Maybe,” she said cheerfully, “but you’re adorable,” and she ran her hands delightedly over his belly, which wasn’t much thicker than it had been but was at least starting to look less sharply-corrugated.

“Hm,” he said.

Things progressed, from there, and they hadn’t done this enough to really have a formula down yet really-- not that Lambert thought sex inevitably got repetitive with the same person, but one tended to fall into certain routines, tended to adopt certain shortcuts, form certain habits, favor particular reliable acts over untested or inconsistent ones. Given Keira’s unsettled relationship with gender, it stood to reason that, especially paired with his own liminal status, they’d switch things up more than was typical. (Not that Lambert knew what was typical.)

He’d done that a little bit with Aiden; generally, Aiden had preferred to be the more active of the two of them, had tended to fuck Lambert more often than being fucked by him, but for the most part they’d not gone in for complicated or involved sex acts, and had mostly settled for handjobs and frottage and occasional oral, saving the really involved stuff that involved someone penetrating someone else for the rare occasions when they were someplace safe and warm and weathertight. Though, of course, there’d been plenty of notable exceptions to that, over the years.

But with Keira he really never knew what they were going to get into. He’d started off generally pretending to be a man, with her, and that did seem to be what she was most used to and would default back to when distracted. She clearly enjoyed the novelty of herself adopting a more masculine role, but didn’t seem to be entirely comfortable with it all the time. And she didn’t seem to grasp the concept that it was okay to stick to simpler acts; she didn’t seem to think it was all right to call the encounter over until there’d been penetration-to-completion of some sort. But then, they’d only done this a relative handful of times, so far. Who knew how things would go once they’d been snowed in here a while.

He growled and rolled over and pinned her to the bed, and she squeaked in delight and wrapped her thighs around him. Now, looking down, the stone rested against the back of his front teeth, and he held it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue. It was clean, well-washed, and tasted only faintly of minerals.

She was breathing hard, and he could smell how aroused she was. He dipped his head and pressed the stone against the pulse of her neck with his tongue. He was still in his underpants, and so was she; he ground down against her and she shivered.

“Fuck,” she gasped. “Fuck, Lambert--”

He made a growly sort of sighing noise against her throat, and she shivered again. “Wh’m I thpthd t’dm w’th’s rock,” he muttered into her pulse point, and she laughed.

“I was getting to that,” she said. He had a good angle on her, just now, where the ridge of his erection was rubbing right against her clit in a way that was clearly working pretty well for her, so he kept at it, and she kept shivering against him and her breath kept hitching. “Oh! So you-- hold onto the object and just-- try to feed your energy into it a little-- while you get closer. You have to-- _hmm!_ \-- start the, kind of, flow of energy, while there’s just a bit, like this--”

He couldn’t tell what in the Goddess’s name she was even talking about at first but then his medallion got a little warm and he suddenly could feel that she was-- she was feeding energy into the stone, and it was warm under his tongue and suddenly he could feel how she was pushing little tendrils of power into it, how it was coming from-- hm! From the same place he reached to cast Signs, it was that kind of power. He hadn’t really fully believed her, that he really could access magic like that, but it was, in fact, the same thing she was doing.

He paused, caught the stone between his teeth again, and pulled back from her a little, and tried to figure out if he could put a _Quen_ shield over her and still fuck her. He’d never tried anything like that. She blinked up at him. “What?” she said.

He spat the rock out and held it between his fingers. “I’m worried I’m going to slip and hit you with something,” he said. “Like what if I burnt you or something? I don’t know how to control this.”

“It’s not-- you won’t cast a Sign by accident,” she said patiently. “It’s all right, I can protect myself.”

“Humor me,” he said.

“Here,” she said, and cast a little charm that tingled and made his medallion buzz. “I’m fireproof and shockproof, but I can still feel your cock.”

“Good,” he said, and put the stone back into his mouth. She laughed, and kissed him, and with the stone pressed between their tongues she got her hand down between them and pulled his cock out of his underpants.

“You first,” she said, and set to work on him. He twitched and shivered in her grasp but decided to just roll with it, transfixed by the intensity of her focus that was both appealing and intimidating. She had as firm a grip on him in that non-physical place as she did on his cock, and she was directing his energy into the stone, and he let go and let her do it and shuddered as he came.

She made a satisfied noise, and he could feel the release on more than just a physical level. He shuddered and twitched and subsided, and she reached up and pulled the stone out from between his teeth, and kissed him.

“There,” she said softly. “Like that. Can you feel that?”

His medallion was quite warm at this point, and he could feel the energy emanating out of the stone. “That’s,” he said.

“That’s almost entirely your energy,” she said. “But it’s not-- you could still cast a Sign if you wanted. Your body makes extra energy during climax, or channels it, or-- I’m not entirely sure where it comes from, there’s a lot of debate about it.”

“Hnng,” he said, but she was right, he didn't feel any more drained than he normally did at a time like this. There was often a moment, post-orgasm, where he could either slide directly off into sleep or leap straight into a second round, and he blinked at it a moment and decided this was clearly a second round kind of occasion. So he picked up his head and rested it on his hand and looked at her. “Is it your turn now?”

She laughed. “It could be,” she said.

“You figure you could sit on my face for this part?” he asked.

“I certainly could,” she said.

Holding the stone between his tongue and her clit was more of a jaw workout than he’d anticipated, but with his fingers inside her and the smell of his own release sharp in his nose he didn’t have to spend long before she was shaking and sobbing out these fantastic little moans, and he could feel more clearly how she was still focused and pushing her own energy into the stone, now.

She rolled off of him and lay there panting for a moment, and he sucked on the stone a moment, then delicately pulled it out between his fingers and offered it to her. It was full of power now, fairly thrumming with it. She grinned at him.

“You can do this with it just sort of nearby,” she said, “but I like to have it really physically present so I don’t forget about it.”

“Understood,” he said. Then, “Wait, do you do this every time you--”

“I mean,” she said, “generally, yes. You can-- you don’t need an orgasm to do this at all, there are all kinds of methods. It’s just that this one’s fun, and fairly easy.”

He regarded the rock with faint suspicion. “But every time-- every time _we_ ,” and he didn’t have to finish the sentence, she grimaced in the kind of contrition that wasn’t really being sorry, it was being sorry at being caught.

“Well, yes,” she admitted, and twined her fingers through the string of beads she always wore. They were power objects, every one of them, he could tell that now. “But--”

“I’m not mad,” he said, resigned. He understood it well enough to know that she wasn’t taking anything out of him when she did it, she was clearly just capturing something that was leaving anyway.

“The point of it,” she said, “is that you could use this to cast a cantrip. If I build out the spell, then-- ostensibly someone with no magical ability at all could cast it, but since you’ve got the ability and the practice you could control it to the extent you can a Sign. And, if I do it right, even if the power becomes exhausted in the power object, you could likely learn how to channel the power you use to cast Signs into it, and hey presto-- you have a new Sign!”

“It likely wouldn’t be as fast as the Signs I already have,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “but I wasn’t going to make something you’d use in combat, anyway.”

“Fair,” he said.

“So… I could make a healing spell,” she said. “And you’d likely have enough control to be able to aim it at just what you needed it to do.”

“If it’s not too complex,” he cautioned.

“Well,” she said, “right.” And then she grinned, and said, “This stone could take more, you want another round?”

He was going to have to start eating more, if she was going to keep working him like this.


	5. Miracle Cure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently this whole story is just about fluff and grief and that's how it is.  
> No warnings; injuries, but no particular gore.
> 
> Oh! I'm going to end this story and break the next chapters off into a sequel, like I'd meant to do after the third chapter. This is the fluff part, and then the plot starts in the next bit.

Keira jumped as Lambert clattered through the door. She hadn’t expected him back today at all; he’d gone into town with her, and had immediately been approached by the alderman about a few problems. She’d been very slightly miffed that none of them had been mentioned to her, but then, as far as the alderman knew, she was just a cunning woman, and also, at least one of the problems was certainly a noonwraith, which was something she _could_ handle but not nearly as effectively or efficiently as Lambert. So he’d gone directly off to take care of things before the snow she’d predicted for later in the week, and he’d been gone two days and had said he’d likely be gone three or four.

They hadn’t finished practicing his new cantrip, but he’d gone this many years without it she couldn’t really let herself worry. And it had been nice to have some peace and quiet.

She’d spent most of the time alone trying out a series of new illusions of what she thought she might like to look like. At the moment she was in a sort of ethereally androgynous one, all slender and willowy and not very curvy. 

“Fuck, sorry,” he said, grabbing the door as it bounced back. He was limping, and she jumped to her feet as he shoved the door closed behind himself. “Hey.”

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said. She came over and looked with concern at his leg, which was wrapped in a bandage around the knee. “No, no-- hey, I didn’t take a potion because I thought I could save it and try your new cantrip thing on it. See, it’s a chance to test it out.”

“What if you bled to death?” she asked, horrified.

“Ha,” he said, “no chance of that, the skin’s not even broken.” He limped stiffly into the house. “Sprained it, pretty bad actually, but it was at the end of the last one, so all I had to do was get home after. Figured if something came up I could use a potion, but otherwise--”

“Then it hurt all the way home,” she said, horrified.

“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s not bad.” He waggled a bottle that he was holding in one hand. “Took the edge off a bit. And it got me sympathy, the alderman paid extra and threw in this bottle. Not bad, not bad at all.” He grimaced; he could barely put weight on it.

“Sit down,” she said, and he waved her off, dumping his gear in a pile by the door. 

“Let me just,” he said, “get-- and then I want to see what it can do.” He handed her the bottle. “Here, there’s a little left, you try some.”

She sniffed it. “Is that just straight vodka?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, “there was some-- herbs I think. ‘Snice.”

She tasted it. Anise, and a bit of peppercorn. Exotic, for these parts. “It isn’t bad,” she allowed. 

“You look cute,” he said, and hobbled over to the chair, finally sitting down with a groan. “Lemme get the boots off, and then I have--”

She collected up the power object she’d built the cantrip into. She’d fashioned him a nice bracelet out of some jewelry of hers she no longer wore, which could go unobtrusively under the cuff of his gauntlet, and then he could cast the cantrip without having to think too hard. She’d made the power object into a roughly circular shape, and built it to be easily called up by a shape of the hand, and he’d had some input into the design initially but she’d finished up all the rest of it while he was gone these last couple of days.

She brought the bracelet over, and took his wrist between her hands and fastened it on. “So,” she said, and showed him the gesture. “Like we decided, and then you should be able to pull on it, and it should be right there.”

She had her own healing charm ready to go, in case he did himself some injury by accident. He was mildly-to-moderately tipsy, and looked and smelled exhausted. Moreover she was sure he’d put his horse away first. He’d suffered needlessly for so long, just to test this, but then, given his lifestyle, it was probably nothing out of the ordinary.

He smiled up at her. “I got two things to try it on,” he said, “but the knee’s bothering me more so let’s give it a shot. Should I take the bandage off?”

“If it helps,” she said. “When I was learning healing charms, I generally did tend to have the thing I was healing visible, so I could see it.”

She had to help him get the bandage off, and then also his trousers. He was wearing long woollen hosen under the trousers, for warmth, and boring utilitarian braies up top, but she still took a moment to admire the muscled lines of his thighs as she rolled the hose down. His poor knee was visibly swollen, and she grimaced at this evidence of his suffering.

“Here goes,” he said. “What’s this one called?”

“ _Cura_ ,” she suggested, and he laughed. 

“I like it,” he said. He shaped his hand into the shape, and frowned in concentration, and she could feel him reaching, metaphorically--

“Pull from the power object,” she said, but he wasn’t, he was pulling from himself. She brought up a shielding charm but not fast enough. 

He cast a Sign on himself, and it flew more violently than her cantrips tended to, but it hadn’t shifted, it wasn’t fire or a blast of force or anything. She felt it ripple outward, and he blinked, and his face went startled, and then he looked up at her. 

“Hot damn,” he said, “that worked.”

“It did?” She looked at his knee, which didn’t look any different in this light. He picked up his leg and bent it, and nodded. Oh, no, it was less swollen, she judged. 

“Worked,” he said. “All right, now for the next thing,” and stood up-- fluidly, easily, on both feet-- to peel off his jerkin, and then the shirt underneath, and she gasped. There were terrible claw-marks running down his flank, crusted with dried blood. 

“That looks awful,” she said. She hadn’t noticed the damage to the jerkin, though now she looked over at it lying on the floor, she could see the bloodstains on the inside, and one of the rents gaping open. “Lambert! It looks terrible!”

“Here’s the thing,” he said, “I can’t really see it, but we’ll see if I can cast a Sign on a thing I can’t see, hey?” He seemed completely unconcerned, and she supposed that probably, these weren’t much of an injury by his standards.

“I suppose so,” she said. “You-- by the way, you didn’t pull from the power object.”

“I didn’t?” He sounded surprised. “I used the spell you made, though, which was attached right to it.”

“It takes practice,” she said.

“But then,” he said, “it works, just-- from me.”

“It can,” she said. “But the point of the power object is that it doesn’t have to.”

“I wonder,” he said, “if I could use that power object to cast one of my regular Signs.”

“Worth experimenting with,” she said. 

“First,” he said, and formed his fingers into the new shape, aiming at his side around behind his arm. This time she felt him pulling from the power object, felt him setting it up carefully before he threw it. 

The dried blood didn’t vanish, but the claw marks closed up, visibly. “Not bad,” she said. “So--”

“So it works on sprains and bruising,” he said, “and it works on slashes. Not bad, not bad at all.”

“A successful experiment,” she said, delighted. 

He laughed, and stood on one leg, using his formerly-injured one, for a moment, contemplative. “So,” he said, “that’s fairly great.”

Keira knew she must not gloat. It was terribly important that she not gloat. What she had with Lambert, such as it was, was a fragile new little thing, and since there was no great tie of fate or commingled destiny or anything between them, she really really needed not to blow everything up with an I-told-you-so. So she clasped her hands together in front of her chest and shut her mouth tightly and smiled and bit her lip, and Lambert looked over at her and burst out laughing. 

“You were right,” he said, “and I should have trusted you.”

“I wasn’t going to say it,” she protested.

“No,” he said. “You weren’t.” He laughed again. “Come on, now I’m more than halfway to drunk, I’m filthy, and I’m in a fantastic mood. Let’s go get in that bathtub.”

* * *

It turned out Lambert didn’t have a fantastic alcohol tolerance. Keira had sort of assumed Witchers could drink their weight in hard liquor and never notice, but she brought a jug of strong beer and by the time he was halfway through his second cup of it he had gone all flushed and giggly in a way she really hadn’t seen him before. 

“Can’t you hold your liquor?” she asked, amused, as he pulled her close and kissed down her throat to her breasts. She’d shed her illusions as she’d gotten undressed to bathe, and so she was in her regular body now, with her unadorned but perfect breasts in his face.

“Bear in mind I had about a pint of straight vodka before,” Lambert said, tipping his head back against the edge of the tub and looking up at her with a soft, crooked grin.

“Fair,” she said. Perhaps it wasn’t truly his tolerance to blame, really.

“And not much to eat,” he added. 

“I should have fed you,” she said.

“I’m plenty grown,” he said, “I chose this as my evening’s entertainment.”

After a bit she said, “I thought you were trained not to have sex in the bathtub.”

“I was trained not to let mages fuck around with my spellcasting abilities either,” he said, which was a pretty good answer. 

After another little bit she said, “No, no, let’s dry off, this isn’t-- that comfortable,” and he laughed and stood up with her in his arms. 

“Fair,” he said, and wrapped them both up in one towel and pinned her against the wall. “So I wasn’t really missing much, all those years.”

“Probably not,” she said, and oh-- she was a little tipsy too, they’d emptied the pitcher, and they spent a pleasant little interlude against the wall before she recollected herself enough to say, “I’m too old to get nailed against a wall.”

They went back through the portal to the house, and detoured through the kitchen for more to drink, and then Lambert got distracted by the pile of his gear near the door and had to pause to pick it all up and put it into his room, hanging the armored bits over the back of a chair so it wouldn’t get deformed by lying in a pile while damp, hanging the swords lovingly on the wall. She had spent very little time in this room, but he didn’t seem to mind her following him in, so she trailed in and sat on the bed and watched him flitting around in the swishy brocade robe very particularly laying all his things out. 

He pulled all the things he’d collected out of his bag-- he’d brought a fair bit of raw spirits with him to preserve things in, and knowing he didn’t have far to carry things had made him profligate with it. He had a dazzling array of biological specimens, botanical and otherwise, and she would have been more excited about it were she not aroused and a bit annoyed with him for having forgotten about that. 

She occupied herself by getting up and laying a fire in the grate and lighting it, then wandering back over to the bed and magicking herself into the nice cast-glass strap-on she liked, and after only a couple of minutes Lambert glanced over and noticed her stroking herself (she’d meant to do so idly but had gotten rather more into it than she’d intended). 

“Huh,” he said, and then grinned, tongue showing between his teeth. It was a startlingly hungry expression, and she liked it. He prowled over to the bed, shucked his robe onto the chair, and climbed in next to her. “Is that how it is?”

“This is how it is,” she said. She didn’t get the cock out all the time; sometimes it was just too much fuss, sometimes she didn’t want it, sometimes she just didn’t care either way. She didn’t know, yet, how she really felt about it on principle, but she did really like the way he handled it.

He rolled over onto her and spit into his hand, which should have been gross, but then he grabbed her cock and his in one hand and started stroking both of them at once. He’d done that before briefly and she’d noticed that it felt really good but now it was almost overwhelming.

“Fuck,” she gasped, shivering a little, and he grinned at her, pressing his forehead to hers.

“Yeah,” he said, “c’mon,” and she held onto him, surrounded by his heat and the scent of him and her soap and strong beer and his slick, strong hand with its calluses and its comprehensive knowledge of things that was starting to include her and things she didn’t even know yet about herself, and she trembled in his grip and her breath was coming fast and her heart was thrumming. “The deal we used to have,” he said to her, nearly whispering, conspiratorial, “was whoever came first had to suck the other one off after,” and she knew immediately who _we_ was and didn’t have to ask. She gasped; she was so close. “But I used to lose on purpose,” he confided, and then he was hitching his breath and his hips, and she came too, clinging to him and barely remembering in time to shove the energy they were both shedding haphazardly into one of her beads. 

It took her a moment to get her breathing under control, and he was kissing her neck. “You,” she said, breathless, and couldn’t finish it.

“He’d laugh at me,” Lambert said, still soft and quiet, tipping his head against the side of hers now. “Said I didn’t need an excuse, I could suck his cock whenever, but. It’s more fun if it’s a game.”

“Yeah,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around him. She wanted to ask questions, wanted him to tell her everything there was to know about this unknown person that somehow had managed to get Lambert to fall in love with him. But she was together enough to know better. She couldn’t take anything he didn’t offer. 

She pulled the blankets up over them, and he sighed and settled down closer against her. “I don’t mean to,” he said, and trailed off.

“No,” she said, “I want-- you can tell me. He must’ve been… really something.”

Lambert didn’t say anything for a while, and she thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. But in a bit he said, “Aiden,” and she knew that was his name. 

“Aiden,” she said quietly. 

“He was another Witcher,” he said. “Don’t know if I said that.”

“Did you train together?” she asked, venturing a question since apparently he was offering.

He shook his head, rolling it back and forth where it was pressed against hers. Maybe it was easier to talk while too close for eye contact. “Different school,” he said. “We met as adults.”

She ran her fingers over the short hair at the back of his neck, meditatively. Did it matter which school? No, she wanted to know more about-- about him, what he’d been like, what he’d done, how they’d been together. But how to ask, without sounding nosy? “You said-- a long time,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Not-- not all at once. We didn’t see each other that much. But every year we’d meet up once or twice for a while, sometimes a long while and sometimes a short one.” She kept her fingers moving, feeling the transition between the soft skin and the soft hair, too short to wind her fingers through. 

He sighed deeply. “We spent a couple of winters together, but just a couple,” he said.

“Hmm,” she said, encouraging. 

“Took me months to find out he was dead,” Lambert said. “Almost a year, I think. I still don’t know-- exactly when it happened.”

She pulled him a little closer, at that, and dug her fingers a little more into his hair. “But you know who did it,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “I killed him. Killed everyone involved.” He was quiet a moment. “Geralt helped,” he added. “When I asked him to. I never-- I never told him about Aiden, until I asked him to help avenge him.”

“You never told him,” she said, a little startled. “What about-- the others?”

Lambert shook his head. “Never talked about it,” he said. “I think-- they knew there was somebody. Some of the other Witchers from his school knew, too. I think they talked to my brothers behind my back. But I never said it, myself.”

“Why not?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Wanted it for myself,” he said. He breathed for a moment, and then huffed a silent laugh against her skin. “I told Ciri, though. When she was a kid. She was… worried she’d never like boys, and that she preferred girls, and so I told her about my secret boyfriend and she liked that.”

Keira laughed too, thinking of that. “Did she not know about,” but wasn’t sure how to finish the question.

“She knew,” he said, “but she was still worried about it. And then she and I had a secret, and she liked that a lot too.”

Keira thought about her own girlhood, thought about how her only secrets had been ones she’d had to carry alone. “That would-- I’d’ve liked that too,” she said, a little wistfully. 

“And I taught her how to do her eyeliner,” Lambert said. “She’s experimented some, but the way she wears it now is still how I taught her.” He sounded smug, and she had to turn her head and kiss his head. 

“That’s adorable,” she said.

“I’m not the worst uncle,” Lambert said. “I’m a terrible gremlin in general and I’m fine with this, but I’m not the worst uncle.”

“Who is?” she asked.

“How should I know?” he asked. “Probably literally all of her blood uncles are worse than me.” He sounded affronted. “For starters!”

She laughed. “That’s probably true,” she said. “Well, you’ll have to show me your eyeliner technique.”

He turned his head and kissed her temple. “It’s a date,” he said. 

* * *

Lambert came into Keira’s workshop with a towel around his neck and wearing the robe. She glanced up, taking a few blinks to focus her eyes on him, and he noted once again she hadn’t warded the door against him at all. 

“You’re damp,” she said.

“I just did a complete overhaul of the stables,” he said, “and put all the old bedding out on the garden plot for the winter. The boy you’ve got coming in is fine but he only does the bare minimum of maintenance, you know? I thought no way are we going to want that manure pile right by the shed all winter.”

She blinked at him. “You… what?”

He spent a moment toweling his hair, though it was short enough to be mostly dry by now. “Well,” he said, and pulled the towel down to look at her. “I don’t idle well, and I figured it was the most constructive way I could use the last of the fair weather.”

She stared at him. “Oh,” she said. 

“I figured I’d better get clean before I started on dinner,” he said. “And then, you know, my weather ribs don’t think we’ll get a storm or anything soon, I might do laundry tomorrow.”

“Weather ribs,” she said blankly. She had clearly been concentrating very deeply on her work, for how much trouble she was having catching up with the conversation now. 

“You know,” he said. “Ones that’ve been broken and didn’t heal right. All Witchers have some bones or other that’ll tell them when a weather front’s moving in.”

“I use magic for that,” she said. “Where are these ribs, I can fix them.”

“No!” he said, wrapping his arms protectively around his midsection. “How else am I going to know when the weather’s changing? Ribs are the best for that, poor Eskel has a weather _femur_.”

“Goodness,” Keira said. “That sounds unpleasant.”

“It is,” Lambert said. “Only upside is, it’s more sensitive than the ribs, so if I feel all right but Eskel’s limping we know a storm’s about twelve hours out.”

“The poor fellow,” Keira said. “Ah, but-- I have a method for laundry, so you don’t have to worry so at the weather.”

“You don’t have to use _magic_ for _laundry_ ,” Lambert said, wildly offended. She was so profligate with the stuff, and then she overdid it-- he could see she had a headache again. She was making-- he actually couldn’t tell what she was doing, and he probably should have asked already. He did note that the cockatrice eye had been disassembled and much of it had been put into little jars of components. 

She laughed. “I don’t have to,” she said, “but it’s a lot easier if I do. I’m not at a court, here, there aren’t servants, so I make do.” She pressed her fingers to her forehead between her eyes briefly, then smiled at him. “I’m not doing it tonight, though.”

“No,” he agreed. He considered it. He’d used the healing cantrip on himself again today; he’d smashed his thumb with a hammer repairing the stall doors, and rather than lose the nail and have to favor it for days while it healed he’d cast the little spell and it had knitted up nicely, even the nail rejoining itself smoothly. It had put him in a better mood, and he’d put the bracelet back on after bathing. “Want me to see if this fixes the headache?” he asked, wiggling his fingers.

“Oh,” she said, looking startled, then delighted. “Would you?”

“If you’re sure it’s safe,” he said. “I mean-- it worked on me but I’m. Me.”

She smiled. “I know,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I designed it, though. Just-- be gentle.”

Something about the way she closed her eyes and presented her face to him made him pause-- she was prepared to unquestioningly accept whatever he did. This close, the veins in her eyelids were blue, and he could see old flecks of scarring across one cheek where she’d likely been caught in a lab explosion, and habitually covered the scars with illusions. Her hair was in a messy careless braid it was barely long enough to stay in, and she was in a shirt he’d given her, one of his old ones with just red embroidery on it, before he’d thought of buying multicolored embroidery. It was very old, washed soft, and had been torn and mended a few times, and had a few bloodstains he’d mostly gotten out. But it was the traditional kind of red-and-whitework that deeply traditional men wore in the Temerian countryside, and Kiera didn’t have anything like that. 

It suited her. 

He collected himself, and cast the Sign, shaping it carefully to go over her headache and ease it. He didn’t know what would happen if he cast it too hard, if it went too deep, if it misunderstood his intention and shaped itself around something else. Healing was tricky, and the other Signs rarely required that kind of subtlety or complexity; _Igni_ burned whatever you threw it at, and _Aard_ shoved anything. _Yrden_ could be manipulated more subtly, though, and _Axii_ , well. That one took all kinds of care as you cast it, and as you manipulated your target afterward. Keira had clearly done research on that to make this one, Lambert thought, but he wasn’t the one who’d told her so he wondered what the source had been. 

Her eyebrows pulled together, then smoothed as the Sign hit her, and she opened her eyes in a moment and blinked dazedly at him. “Ah,” she said, “that’s much better. Thank you!”

“It works,” he said, pleased. 

She blinked at him from close range, and then leaned in a little and kissed him, sweetly. “I’m almost done here,” she said, “and then I can help with dinner.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well thanks for coming along on this ride, friends; there's a sequel coming soon, and I have a whole lot written of it, so it'll be coming along quickly. It's going to be more angst and plot and less fluff, so I figured I'd stick a little endpoint in here-- at least for myself as a reader, I think I'd want that so when I'm rereading I can separate it out more easily. You got to please yourself, as apparently Ricky Nelson once said. (I had to look that up.)

**Author's Note:**

> Specific Witcher 3 spoilers, which do not occur in all versions of the game (well, some of them do):  
> There was a battle at Kaer Morhen, over Ciri's fate, in which Keira saved Lambert from being killed.  
> Vesemir was killed in this battle.  
> Eskel, Geralt, and Lambert survived, as did Ciri.
> 
> Aiden exists in canon solely as Lambert's dead friend in Witcher 3, so for the purposes of _this story_ , he is dead.


End file.
